**Courtesy Of DC Studios And Warner Bros. Pictures**

Milly Alcock brings bruised, messy energy to Kara Zor-El and Jason Momoa has obvious fun as Lobo, but Craig Gillespie’s cosmic DC adventure turns a promising heroine into a strangely generic revenge quest.

There is a more interesting ‘Supergirl’ hiding inside Craig Gillespie’s new DC film, and every so often, it fights its way to the surface. It appears in the flashbacks to Argo City, where Kara Zor-El watches the last remnants of Kryptonian life drift toward extinction. It appears in Milly Alcock’s sharp, wounded performance, which gives Kara the unstable charge of someone who has inherited not hope, but grief. It appears in the too-brief scenes between Kara and David Corenswet’s Superman, where their contrast is immediately clear: Clark was raised by love, Kara was raised by catastrophe.

Those fragments suggest a film with real emotional purpose. Kara is not simply Superman’s cousin with longer hair and a cape. She is a survivor of cultural collapse, a young woman who remembers what Clark was too young to know, and that difference should give ‘Supergirl’ its own identity inside the new DC Universe. Instead, Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira place that pain inside a familiar interplanetary revenge story that borrows from ‘True Grit,’ ‘John Wick,’ ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ and the worn-out house style of modern cosmic franchise filmmaking without ever fully becoming its own thing.

The result is a frustrating second big-screen chapter for DC Studios’ rebooted universe. After James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ reintroduced the franchise with a bright, bruised sincerity and enough eccentricity to suggest that DC might finally be loosening up, ‘Supergirl’ arrives with a theoretically stranger premise but a far more mechanical execution. It wants to be scrappy, dirty, emotional and punkish, but too often it feels like a studio action film running on autopilot, checking off planets, villains, needle drops, creatures, quips and combat beats without giving Kara’s journey the force it deserves.

Alcock plays Kara as a hard-drinking, self-destructive Kryptonian refugee who spends her time on planets with red suns, where her powers are weakened enough for her to feel mortal, vulnerable and drunk. That is a smart character idea, and Alcock immediately understands the appeal of a Supergirl who is not shiny or uncomplicated. Her Kara is abrasive, reckless and emotionally blocked, but she also carries a moral instinct that keeps breaking through the armor. Alcock’s performance is the best reason to watch the film, not because the script gives her a fully satisfying arc, but because she keeps suggesting one.

The story draws heavily from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s ‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,’ with Kara pulled into a revenge mission by Ruthye Marye Knoll, played by Eve Ridley. Ruthye is a young girl whose family is slaughtered by Krem of the Yellow Hills, a vicious leader of interplanetary brigands played by Matthias Schoenaerts. After Krem steals Kara’s ship and poisons Krypto with a lethal dart, Kara and Ruthye are forced into an uneasy partnership that turns grief, vengeance and survival into the engine of the plot. Warner Bros.’ film is directed by Gillespie, written by Ana Nogueira and stars Alcock, Schoenaerts, Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa.

On paper, this should work. A damaged Kryptonian hero and an orphaned girl chasing the man who destroyed her family is strong mythic material. It gives Kara a younger mirror, a chance to confront her own rage and an opportunity to decide whether justice means something different from revenge. The film clearly understands that structure in outline, but it rarely deepens the bond between Kara and Ruthye enough to make the emotional payoff land. Ridley has presence, and her anger gives the movie a clear moral pressure point, but the relationship between the two characters never develops with the texture it needs. Their journey is busy, not transformative.

That busyness becomes the film’s biggest problem. Kara and Ruthye move from one scuzzy planet to another, boarding a wormhole bus, clashing with space pirates, encountering grotesque alien lowlifes, navigating outlaw towns and stumbling through a series of settings that feel designed more as visual pit stops than dramatic worlds. The film wants a lived-in, grungy galaxy, but too much of it looks like a collection of rejected cantina creatures and vaguely industrial backdrops. For a movie that should feel dangerous, strange and expansive, ‘Supergirl’ often feels cramped and curiously dull.

Gillespie has previously shown a real knack for volatile women who do not fit the boxes built for them. ‘I, Tonya’ and ‘Cruella’ were both messy in their own ways, but they understood the appeal of women who weaponize performance, resentment and survival. That history makes ‘Supergirl’ even more disappointing, because Kara should be an ideal match for his sensibility. She is angry, funny, traumatized and out of step with the clean inspirational language of traditional superheroism. Yet the film keeps sanding down that potential by pushing her through generic action beats instead of letting her psychology shape the movie.

The flashbacks to Krypton are the exception. David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham bring warmth and sorrow as Kara’s parents, and those scenes carry a tragic grandeur largely missing from the rest of the film. They also make the case for a more focused origin story. Watching Kara resist being sent away, watching her process the death of her home and understanding why Clark’s optimism feels almost alien to her would have made for a stronger movie than the revenge chase we get. The fragments are powerful enough to make the viewer wish the entire film had been built around them.

Jason Momoa, meanwhile, enters as Lobo and immediately gives the movie a jolt it badly needs. He looks like a heavy-metal fever dream, all swagger, cigar smoke, bad attitude and bounty-hunter bravado. Momoa has long seemed like natural casting for Lobo, and the film confirms the instinct even while underusing him. His presence is larger than the material, and his scenes have the anarchic charge the rest of the movie keeps reaching for but rarely sustains. Lobo feels like he wandered in from a more dangerous, funnier and less cautious DC movie.

Schoenaerts has the opposite problem as Krem. The actor gives the villain an imposing physical presence, with piercings, menace and a brutal stillness, but the character is more design than psychology. He is cruel because the plot requires cruelty, violent because the revenge structure requires violence and visually memorable because the movie needs a recognizable antagonist. But he lacks the complexity that could make him a meaningful counterforce to Kara. For a story built around grief and vengeance, Krem is surprisingly thin.

The action is competent but rarely thrilling. There are fights, chases, drones, pirates, space vehicles, swords and superpowered collisions, but few sequences have the visceral shape or emotional build that separates memorable set pieces from expensive movement. Claudia Sarne’s industrial score gives the movie some momentum, and the stunt work has moments of physical snap, but the overall effect is oddly flat. ‘Supergirl’ is not incoherent, exactly. It is worse than that: it is comprehensible and still underwhelming.

The film’s visual palette also underserves the material. A Supergirl movie built around grief, punk defiance and cosmic revenge should feel tactile and unpredictable. Instead, the worlds often blur into the same dirty, dimly lit genre sludge. Even the alien grotesquerie becomes repetitive. The creatures are gross more than menacing, and the environments rarely have the imagination needed to make the galaxy feel worth exploring. ‘Supergirl’ is trying to distinguish itself from the cleaner, more Earthbound optimism of ‘Superman,’ but grit alone is not a personality.

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That comparison is unavoidable. Gunn’s ‘Superman’ was not universally beloved, but it had a beating heart and a clear sense of what its hero represented. It knew that sincerity could feel radical in a cynical superhero landscape. ‘Supergirl’ has a more complicated protagonist, but a less confident movie around her. Kara’s worldview is harsher than Clark’s, and that should make her story feel sharper. Instead, the film keeps reducing her complexity to attitude, hangovers and fight choreography.

Still, Alcock deserves credit for making Kara feel like a character worth following into future films. She resists the blandness around her, giving the role a flinty intelligence and emotional volatility that suggest DC has found a compelling Supergirl even if it has not yet found the right story for her. Her best moments are small: a look of disgust at false sentiment, a flicker of grief she tries to bury, a hard edge that softens when Krypto or Ruthye breaks through. She makes Kara messy in a way that feels lived-in rather than branded.

The film’s emotional thesis, such as it is, rests on the difference between truth and hope. Clark sees the good in people because Earth gave him reasons to believe in goodness. Kara sees the truth because Krypton taught her that worlds end, parents die and survival does not make anyone noble by default. That is a fascinating distinction, and the movie should have trusted it more. Instead of shaping the film around Kara’s perspective, ‘Supergirl’ keeps interrupting her pain with franchise obligations and borrowed genre rhythms.

There is also a sense that material has been trimmed away. Certain relationships feel underdeveloped, transitions feel abrupt and Krypto’s role, despite being central to the ticking clock, sometimes feels more like plot device than emotional companion. The movie ends in a place that should feel warmer and more complete, but the connective tissue is not fully there. For a film under two hours, it still manages to feel both overstuffed and undernourished.

That may not prevent ‘Supergirl’ from performing well. Milly Alcock is a strong lead, Jason Momoa’s Lobo will generate attention and the DCU still has enough curiosity around it to draw audiences eager to see where Gunn and Peter Safran’s new era goes next. But as a film, this is a step down from the promise of ‘Superman.’ It expands the universe without deepening it. It introduces a heroine with real potential, then strands her in a story that rarely rises to meet her.

The original 1984 ‘Supergirl’ became a kind of camp object partly because its failures were flamboyant, strange and excessive. This new ‘Supergirl’ has the opposite problem. It is too professionally assembled to be a disaster, but too cautious and routine to become memorable. Alcock gives the film a spark. Momoa gives it a charge. The flashbacks give it a soul. But the movie keeps drifting away from its best instincts.

‘Supergirl’ should feel like the arrival of a dangerous new kind of Kryptonian hero. Instead, it feels like a promising character waiting for a better movie to catch up with her.

RATING: ★★½☆☆

That’s a Wrap

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That’s a Wrap | Supergirl |

“Milly Alcock gives DC a scrappy, wounded and compelling Kara Zor-El, but ‘Supergirl’ buries its best ideas inside a sluggish cosmic revenge story that never fully takes flight.”

— Joanthan P. Moustakas

CREDITS

Release Date: Friday, June 26
Cast: Milly Alcock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Eve Ridley, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet, Jason Momoa
Director: Craig Gillespie
Screenwriter: Ana Nogueira
Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures / DC Studios
Run Time: 1 hour 47 minutes
Rated PG-13