Supergirl

He sees the goodness in everyone, I see a distinct lack of it in this movie.

Did you know that Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl (Milly Alcock), is a hard-partying, wisecracking drunk? Did you also know that she’s Superman’s (David Corenswet) cousin? If you didn’t get it within the first 30 seconds, you’ll definitely get it by the time Kara is 10 shots down and crowd surfing. That’s the character in a nutshell, really, just knocking back drinks on every red-sun planet she can find, waking up to her beloved (and overly CGI’d) dog, Krypto, slobbering over her, and hiding behind a pair of oversized sunglasses until the hangover subsides and she can do it all over again.

By trying so hard to sell us on how different this version of Kara is compared to her goody Earth-bound cousin, Supergirl falls flat because its attempts at being cleverly subversive come off as annoying imitations of far better movies. Make no mistake, Kara gives off plenty of ‘fun’ vibes, and you can easily see yourself partying with her. But when we get to the clumsily spliced-in flashbacks of how Kara ended up on Earth, it’s depressing to see how storytelling for complex female characters in 2026 still amounts to nothing more than ‘alcoholism/drug addiction/some vice equals dealing with trauma and vulnerabilities’.

As Kara and Krypto are partying it up on some planet, their paths cross with Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley), who telegraphs her own rip-roaring journey of revenge against the ‘evil for the sake of being evil’ big bad, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), by repeating it like an Inigo Montoya-esque mantra. On paper, it makes sense to have two broken people bond over their respective trauma and glean insight into character. In practice, though, the Ana Nogueira-penned script is stuffed with moments of inexplicable incompetence amounting to nothing more than padding, yet the 108-minute runtime feels longer than an Avatar movie.

There are several infuriating instances where Ruthye is as useless as a dull sword but gets involved in a skirmish anyway, causing more trouble for Kara, whose ‘competence’ switch turns on and off at random. There’s a lot of talk about processing trauma, but Ruthye is unashamedly characterised as a morality chain for Kara’s own character arc. The script keeps their intelligence levels fluctuating according to what the plot demands, and never lets them grow beyond basic ‘strong female character’ clichés whose surface-level flaws are mistaken for actual human depth.

It doesn’t help that everything in Supergirl looks dark and grimy. Just because the titular character eats dirt (metaphorically and literally) doesn’t mean every corner of each frame needs to look like it. There are some fight scenes where it was downright impossible to figure out what was going on because of the quick camera movements and excessively brown or browner backdrops. The only time we get any hint of actual colour is when Kara puts on her super suit, and that still looks more Snyder-verse coded than James Gunn’s brightly colourful Superman.

And yet, I still sympathised with Kara throughout Supergirl. Her backstory, considerably more tragic than Clark’s, is told as messily as her hangovers, but Alcock’s expressive blue eyes sell it better than any Kryptonian superpower. There’s an art to ‘sloppy drunk’ acting, and Alcock’s inner Aussie is perfectly suited for it. When Kara’s classic ‘scream my pain away into the void’ moment arrived, it was the only time I felt something resembling an emotional core for the character, despite director Craig Gillespie and Gunn’s efforts to persuade me otherwise. The only other character worth mentioning is Jason Momoa’s gonzo take on Lobo because he understood the assignment and is having an absolute ball of a time, despite also being overly powerful or stupidly incompetent depending on what the plot needs him to do.

It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s a solid foundation to be found here. Gunn talked a lot about having a solid finished script ready before filming, but Supergirl’s odd flip-flopping of timelines, incomprehensible character actions that make one question their common sense, and an ungodly amount of exposition tells us otherwise. It goes to show that Gunn’s mix of dry self-awareness and earnestness is incredibly difficult to emulate, and Gillespie only manages to achieve a pale imitation of what Superman had successfully pulled off previously.

Speaking of a certain red cape and underwear-wearing Kryptonian, Clark Kent keeps popping up, even when his entire role could’ve been cut from Supergirl with no impact on the story. Whether it’s Clark constantly calling to check in or Kara telling her sob backstory to Ruthye and it inevitably circling back to how she’s constantly compared to her cousin, the movie is unable — or straight up refuses — to untether itself to the Superman of it all.

This then begs the question of why even make Supergirl at all when the creative team behind it aren’t even confident enough to let it stand on its own terms without its golden boy cousin to shadow it. I suppose the reason we don’t hang out with the dead weight, screw-up of a cousin is because they’re walking buzzkills. Supergirl may have her moments of fun, but neither she nor her movie is reliable or coherent enough for us to hang around for too long.