Supergirl Review

The pitch is good. Take Superman's cousin off Earth entirely, drop her into a hard drinking space western, and let the lead play the character as furious rather than sunny. Milly Alcock delivers on it. She is loose, bruised and funny, she gives Kara a swagger that survives every weak scene around her, and the near unanimous verdict from reviewers is that the film is worth seeing for her and for very little else.

Craig Gillespie can time a joke but has no feel for scale, so the action arrives as noise, cut fast and lit flat, and the cosmic vistas Rob Hardy supplies never gather any weight. The script is what critics went after hardest. Motivation is announced rather than dramatized, the quest structure resets every twenty minutes, and the grief meant to serve as the emotional spine gets stated in dialogue and then dropped.

Jason Momoa turns up as Lobo and is enormously entertaining in a way that has nothing to do with the story he is interrupting, which several reviewers read as a woman led film handing its liveliest scenes to a man. The tone sits in an unhappy middle too, grimmer than the Superman picture it follows without being darker in any meaningful sense. It lost a great deal of money and the aggregates landed in the mixed to negative band. Alcock has earned a better sequel.