What's So Bad About 'Supergirl,' Anyway?

Superhero fatigue is here. Of the last four major superhero movies (and I’m not even counting the Sony Spider-Man universe bombs), three of the four weren’t actually profitable at the box office: The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Thunderbolts, and Captain America: Brave New World. The exception was Superman, which wasn’t a monstrous hit in its own right; it actually made less than Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, but counted as a success against the backdrop of a failing genre.

So Supergirl faced an uphill battle from the jump, and that’s before we get to the toxic-male superhero fandom that reflexively rejects female-led films, the same contingent that inexplicably went after Brie Larson.

To offset a faltering genre and these dumbass boys who ruin everything, Supergirl needed to be exceptional. Or at least, like Superman, really freakin’ good. Supergirl was not really freakin’ good. Charitably, it was mediocre.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Milly Alcock. I think she makes for a great Supergirl. But screenwriter Ana Nogueira absolutely failed her. It’s not that Kara Zor-El is a 23-year-old wayward drunk - the disgruntled, woe-is-me superhero trope has worked plenty of times before. It’s that, as redemption stories go, this one fell flat on its ass.

The plot is simple enough: Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem of the Yellow Hills, leader of the Brigands, a band of space pirates and human traffickers. In the opening, he kills the parents and brother of Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) over some really strong knives. Ruthye, a teenager, sets out to avenge her family by using one of those really strong knives to kill Krem. She eventually recruits a very begrudging Kara, who only signs on because Krem has shot her dog, Krypto, with a poison dart and Krem holds the only antidote.

So, basically, Supergirl is about Kara saving her dog. Avenging Ruthye’s parents is tertiary, and the fact that the Brigands are human traffickers reads as more of a plot contrivance than a motivation for Kara. That these space pirates were abducting women to breed more space pirates should have been a call to arms all on its own. Instead, it’s mostly about Krypto and, by the end, a little about Ruthye.

As sidekicks go, I really wanted to like Ruthye, but she’s thinly written and not fun. Which is the biggest problem with Supergirl as a whole: it’s not fun. It’s not Zack Snyder levels of doom-and-gloom or anything, but there are no fun quips, no sense of joy, and - I guess - director Craig Gillespie wanted to make Kara distinct enough from Superman that he never gave her the moral center that makes that film so endearing.

There are no witty retors. There’s no clever banter. Kara drifts through most of the movie on apathy, like someone turned Wednesday Addams into a drunken superhero. There were so many points where I thought she’d finally climb out of her funk and become not just a bright, shining beacon of truth, justice, blah blah blah, but at least the hero that Ruthye and the trafficked women needed in that moment.

But man, she just really wanted that antidote to save her dog. The loner vibe never sits right.

And here’s another problem - a huge one - for Supergirl: there are no great needle drops. This is a James Gunn-produced film. Where the hell was he? The man lives for a great soundtrack, and the best thing Supergirl has going for it is a moody, downbeat cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” by Kelty Greye and KidMotel. An complete failure of a soundtrack.

And Jason Momoa’s Lobo? What the hell was he? Ostensibly a chaos-agent villain who just happens to share an enemy with Kara and Ruthye, he plays less like a person than a toy: pull the string in the back of his neck and he blows some sh** up. But at least Momoa, unlike everyone else in the film, looked like he was having a good time.

Look: I genuinely appreciate that Gillespie and Nogueira didn’t go full girlboss with the character. But there’s gotta be something between Captain Marvel and superhero Veronica Sawyer. The whole shebang was just muted and glum. It was lit like a fun action-adventure, and the characters were built for one, but it just kind of limped along until it ran out of steam. It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not a very fun one. It’s almost like DC and James Gunn completely forgot what it was we loved about Superman that made it the rare exception to our growing disinterest in superhero movies.