Faster than a speeding bullet, Supergirl hot takes are flying around the internet. The second installment in the rebooted DC Cinematic Universe launches in theaters on June 26, but the fandom war over the movie has been raging online for many weeks and months thanks to the eternal battle between the internet trolls and the super-fans.
Of course, most moviegoers who opt to ride shotgun with Milly Alcock‘s Woman of Tomorrow at the multiplex this weekend will fall in between those two extremes. And they’ll be looking for a zippy summer blockbuster in the spirit of James Gunn‘s relaunched Superman, which received largely positive notices and banked just enough at the box office to be deemed a flight-worthy franchise.
As teased in the trailers, David Coresnswet’s Man of Steel checks in with his cousin periodically throughout Supergirl, including an ending scene that tees up next summer’s Superman: Man of Tomorrow. (Pro tip — don’t bother staying through the credits; there’s nothing waiting for you.)
Clocking in at just under two hours, Supergirl is certainly zippy. The movie wastes little time dispatching Kara Zor-El on a planet-hopping trip through the outer reaches of the DC universe as she tries to track down the malevolent marauder (Matthias Schoenaerts) responsible for poisoning her beloved dog, Krypto. Given three days to recover the antidote that can cure the super-pup, our heroine pursues her target across multiple alien environments, gaining sidekicks like Eve Ridley’s vengeance seeking teen Rutheye and Jason Momoa‘s randomly integrated and heavily ADR’d bounty hunter Lobo along the way.
Kara is also plagued by flashbacks to her pre-Supergirl life in the aftermath of Krypton’s destruction, and profound feelings of grief over losing her family at an age when she was old enough to remember them — unlike her cousin, who was rocketed to Earth as an infant. That material gives the movie a slightly darker undercurrent than Superman, and brings up emotions that the film seems almost reluctant to engage with lest it bum the audience out.
To her credit, Alcock runs towards that edge instead of from it, even when the material she’s been given by director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira doesn’t fully support her particular take on Kara. Then again, Supergirl reportedly went through a substantial round of reshoots and editing room tweaks, so their original conception of the movie may not be entirely what ended up onscreen. That’s something this film has in common with its 1984 predecessor, which had a famously turbulent production that clearly impacted the finished product. (Helen Slater’s Kara still slaps, though.)
Even critics who enjoyed their time in Supergirl’s company aren’t blind to the film’s shortcomings; the bumpy narrative and chaotic action sequences are flagged across the board. That’s why Supergirl is stuck in the middle ground on both Rotten Tomatoes, where it’s holding onto a 61 percent Fresh rating, and Metacritic, where it’s registering at 49 percent approval. Here’s a sampling of the reactions.
It’s Super!
IndieWire’s Kate Erbland leads the defense with a generous B-grade review that praises Alcock and the filmmakers’ decision not to elevate this “grimy, small-scale adventure” to the level of a backstory-intensive saga. “[It’s] an entry into the growing — and reworked — DC Studios canon that feels refreshingly not beholden to the adventures (and movies) that chronicle her goody-two-shoes cousin Superman,” she writes, later noting: “What makes Supergirl stand out … is its interest in staying small while asking some very big questions indeed.”
At the same time, Erbland acknowledges that the movie doesn’t quite serve up the super-spectacle that comic book cinemagoers might want. “Some things are familiar, like the film’s action sequences, which love to lean on Kara’s ability to go very fast while everyone else seems very slow,” she says. “Despite the relatively small-scale nature of the girls’ quest. … Supergirl can’t escape other trappings of the superhero genre. As in, can we interest you in a little other beloved comic book character introduction?”
Writing in The A.V. Club, Jesse Hassenger also comes to praise, not bury, Supergirl with another B-review. “The editing involved in getting the movie down to a lean 108 minutes is a little choppy, as if the filmmakers are antsily unaware of just how likable Alcock is in this role, or nervous about making a superhero movie with two female leads,” he candidly notes before cuing up an anticipated “But.”
“But for every instance of Supergirl simplifying the words, timeline, visual invention, or thematic concerns of its source, there’s a moment where the movie feels scruffier and more lively than so many of its comics-based brethren, which tend to water down their inspirations even further,” Hessenger continues. “This one still has Supergirl riding a mangy interplanetary bus, picking fights with a spaceship, and blasting an astonishingly good set of soundtrack tunes.”
USA Today‘s Brian Truitt is also in the “liked it” camp, with a three-star review that calls Alcock “a perfectly hell-raising hero.”
“A lack of focus, not nearly enough Krypto and a one-note baddie in Schoenaerts’ Krem don’t do Supergirl any favors,” Truitt adds. “But they also don’t derail the film’s overall vibe of spunky weirdness. With Corenswet’s handful of appearances, he continues to cement his place as a darn good Superman. But here it’s Alcock who’s making her own cinematic statement: She’s not going anywhere, and the new DCU is better with a hell-raising Supergirl in it.”
It’s Not Super
Leading the prosecution is RogerEbert.com’s Tomris Laffly, who comes out swinging at Supergirl with a 1.5-star review. “It might very well be a winner at the box office, and it thankfully doesn’t require that much homework in order to follow,” she writes, teeing up her own “But” counterargument. “But that doesn’t mean that this noisy and unimaginative picture, powered by little else than merely passable action sequences, flat humor, and a collection slimy inter-galactical characters with fangs, fins, and numerous eyes around their oddly shaped noggins, is any less headache-inducing.”
“Most offensive is perhaps the 101-level feminism that Supergirl still tries to sell, nearly a decade after Wonder Woman (and many similarly-minded flicks since then) sparked a frustrating discourse in culture, as if one’s love and support of a female superhero would measure their commitment index to feminism and representation in media,” Laffly continues. “I wondered how much longer we are expected to make do with, even cheer for, these cutesy and shallow faux-feminism you-go-girl crumbs, when the industry’s commitment to real gender parity has been on a demonstrably steep decline everywhere else, especially since the start of COVID.”
For his part, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney dismisses Supergirl as a “caped caper stuck on autopilot,” and ‘fesses up to his affection for the Slater version, warts and all.
“Alcock’s scrappy characterization, tempering Kara’s jaded toughness and chaotic messiness with an increasingly strong sense of justice, would seem an ideal fit to continue in a similar vein,” he writes. “But Supergirl only intermittently comes to life when it revisits her painful past, Given Australian director Gillespie’s history with films about spirited, rule-breaking women, like I, Tonya and Cruella, the failure to find emotional depth in the sisterhood of Kara and Ruthye is notable.”
And over on Vulture, Alison Willmore says that even her “soft spot for space dirtbags” couldn’t make her completely fall in love with Supergirl the movie — although she likes Alcock’s Supergirl just fine.
“Supergirl aims for something along the lines of Superman, only darker, and achieves that goal only in the most literal sense,” Willmore argues. “Supergirl takes place in a space-operatic landscape so generic it feels downright insulting, especially when the visual murkiness of the settings makes it hard to follow the already unintelligible action sequences.”
