Supergirl
All fight, no follow-through.
Kara Zor-El, a.k.a. Supergirl (Milly Alcock), has been angry for a long time. She masks her anger with a party-girl exterior, jumping from bar to bar across the galaxy, but it’s always a party of one (give or take her dog, Krypto). Her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet) loves life on Earth, but he grew up there; she’s a more recent refugee, uncomfortable among the crowds and unhappy with the overwhelming powers that the yellow sun gives her. So she drowns her sadness by jumping from planet to planet, choosing places that have red suns, which affect her physiology differently than Earth’s sun, allowing her to get drunk. In the umpteenth stop at the umpteenth roadhouse bar on a backwater planet, she slips some coins into a jukebox and selects “catch these fists” by Wet Leg. The song is kinetic and aggressive, with a catchy guitar riff and a chorus that ends with the line, “I don’t want your love, I just wanna fight!” It’s a thesis statement that the movie can never quite live up to.
Supergirl (directed by Craig Gillespie and adapted by Ana Nogueira from the recent Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow limited series) is the second DC Comics movie adaptation since James Gunn took over the franchise, and it serves as a post-ironic counterpoint to last year’s earnest Superman. Despite the relative recency of Gunn’s tenure and despite the contrasting tones between the two installments, this is a movie we’ve seen before. Plot-wise, it’s a cosmic version of True Grit in spandex, with Kara playing the part of Rooster Cogburn to a teenaged girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) seeking revenge against the space brigands who murdered her family. The tone is of a piece with Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel: irreverent, scrappy, and gross (there’s a lot of puking throughout).
Gross behavior in superhero movies isn’t a bad thing; it’s just that it’s been a decade since the device was novel. Guardians of the Galaxy felt fun and a little dangerous because its heroes were jerks who swore. Supergirl is similarly abrasive in tone, but it lacks the edge and convictions of its predecessors. “Cosmic superhero True Grit” could have been great if Supergirl were willing to dig deeper into its convictions, but this is a film that doesn’t fully know what it wants or how to go about getting it. Contrary to those Wet Leg lyrics, Kara does want love, and she does not really want to fight; she just doesn’t have a healthy outlet to express her own rage, and she needs to be pushed out of her sadness via a call to an adventure she would rather not go on. That would make for an interesting story if the film knew what to do with her feelings of isolation. It could be about sobriety, except the thread gets lost partway through. It feints toward ideas about revenge and agency but keeps paralyzing its characters at the very moment they’re supposed to make decisions. It simply has too many ideas and not enough follow-through.
Grossest of all is the way the film handles its villainous brigands, an all-male group of space pirates who raid other planets for supplies, weapons, and prisoners. They always kidnap girls, a word the film uses deliberately: the prisoners are supposed to be young, and they are kidnapped specifically to help sustain the brigand population. The script raises the specter of human trafficking and sexual slavery, then shies away from the ideas almost entirely. The subplot doesn’t need to be any more explicit than it already is, but the film lacks courage in addressing the issue at all. The kidnapped women—despite the language in the screenplay, the brigands’ prisoners appear fully grown—are dressed in white, gauzy gowns that echo the clothes of the escaped women in Mad Max: Fury Road. But the women who share this plight in Supergirl barely speak, let alone have minds of their own. Fury Road and True Grit share a moral backbone that Supergirl simply can’t touch. It’s not enough to mouth the lyrics to a punk-rock song. If you want to fight, then fight. Make the punches count. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★☆☆☆
Supergirl is in theaters everywhere now.