As DC Comics’ most venerable (and occasionally bankable) family, Kal-El and Kara Zor-El (better known as Superman and his cousin Supergirl) share the unenviable destiny of being recycled and reinvented for the next generation of audiences for as long as the concept of superheroes exists… or until civilization collapses, whichever comes first. While the ‘Man of Steel’ has appeared in multiple movie incarnations since Christopher Reeve portrayed him in his genre-defining 1978 debut, his cousin has had a less-than-stellar box office history, having headlined only once. That outing, 1984’s Supergirl starring Helen Slater, bombed so badly that its failure prompted producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind to sell the movie rights of the entire Superman franchise to the Cannon Group two years later. Time has not been kind to Slater’s saccharine-blonde, one-dimensionally wholesome Kara; four intervening decades of intersectional feminism has seen the film age like a rancid, unpalatable cheese.
This summer finally sees Supergirl’s return to theaters, in the form of Australian actress Millie Alcock, fresh from her small-screen success as the young Rhaenyra Targaryen in HBO’s House of the Dragon. In contrast with Slater’s naive, wide-eyed, childlike interpretation, Alcock’s Kara is a grungier proposition. The film opens with a floor-level tracking shot of the squalid, garbage-strewn interior of her living space as she is awakened from a drunken stupor by the sound of her dog, Krypto, urinating on her belongings. Kara, it turns out, is in the midst of a protracted galactic bar-crawl. She is celebrating / avoiding her imminent 23rd birthday by getting inebriated in as many wretched hives of scum and villainy as possible.
Much to Kara’s annoyance, her alcoholic vacation from reality is brought to a crashing halt when she is pestered by a teenage orphan Ruthye (British newcomer Eve Ridley) into helping her avenge the brutal murder of her family, perpetrated by Krem of the Yellow Hills — rampaging marauder, trafficker of young girls, and all-round Bad Person. Krem seals his fate by shooting Krypto with a poisoned dart, sending Kara into John Wick mode. The mission is simple: Kara has three days to get the poison antidote from a chain around Krem’s neck before Krypto dies. I mean, can’t a girl even drink herself senseless without a bunch of cinematic refugees from Mad Max murdering her dog? Rude, much?
If this all sounds like an incoherent, all-over-the-place mess, it is! By the time Jason Momoa turns up on a jet-powered space-Harley Davidson, chomping a cigar and dressed like a roadie for an interplanetary death metal band, it’s like… why not, right? After all, Kara was just picked up by a space-Greyhound at a bus stop in what looked suspiciously like Scotland, kicked the ass of some space-pirates, and narrowly avoided asphyxiating in space because the planet the bus stopped at happened to have a green sun; so, Jason Momoa on a space-bike makes perfect sense… right? Meanwhile, scattered between all this chaos, we get Kara’s origin story in flashbacks, by way of explaining in crayon why her hard-drinking ‘riot grrrrl’ persona is just a mask covering her trauma and grief (as if we hadn’t worked that out about three minutes into the picture).
In short, this is a truly awful movie! None of it is Millie Alcock’s fault. She is undoubtedly the only good thing about the entire sorry fiasco, displaying genuine charisma as Kara and doing her level best with a script that reads like it was written by ChatGPT on an off day. Alcock deserves better than this. Supergirl deserves better than this. Anybody who paid for a ticket deserves better than this. Even the dog deserves better than this — and the dog is CGI!
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities from Scotland, Damien Beagan is a former freelancer who wrote film and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.
