Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) — Screenplay by Ana Nogueira.
Timing is of paramount importance when you want to release a highly-budgeted film in theaters around the world. You have to make sure that you’re not putting something out at a time when people are really laser-focused on other activities. One film that I think may’ve been really hurt by the timing of the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer is Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl. At least, I never got around to watching it in theaters, because I prioritized other films and shows when I wasn’t watching football. It looks like I wasn’t the only one who skipped it, because it really struggled during its theatrical release, to say the least. But I was, and still am, quite interested in the title character and the film as a whole, so when this film had its streaming premiere recently, I felt compelled to give it a real chance and a full standalone review. Supergirl isn’t great, but I also don’t think it’s a disaster. It exists somewhere in the territory between unremarkable and okay, and in the process of writing this review, I tried to figure out exactly at which end I found myself.
Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl takes place sometime after the events of James Gunn’s Superman, at the end of which we met Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, also known as Supergirl, when she stopped by Earth to pick up her dog Krypto. Now, at the start of this film, she’s back in space with her beloved and super-powered pet, as she’s trying to drown her sorrows at the time of her 23rd birthday. That’s when she meets Ruthye (played by Eve Ridley). Ruthye is a young girl on a journey to avenge her family after her parents and brother were murdered by the ruthless bandit named Krem of the Yellow Hills (played by Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye needs the help of someone powerful to find and kill Krem. But right as Kara is in the process of rejecting Ruthye, Krem and his fellow bandits steal Kara’s spaceship and shoot a poisonous dart at Krypto. Now Kara must track down Krem in the hope of getting the antidote so that she can save her dog. Ruthye tags along, as she seems determined to kill Krem, regardless of the insistence of Kara’s protests.
I rewatched the 1984 Helen Slater-led, Jeannot Szwarc-directed Supergirl film the other day to prepare for this year’s version. That 1984 flick was such a strange, cheap-looking, and occasionally quite cheesy oddity. It was also both overlong and poorly paced, as the film just ground to a halt in the Phantom Zone scenes. It’s also full of logical inconsistencies and things it fails to explain. I had forgotten exactly how reductive this film was in how the female characters were written. Other than the title character, there were basically only three types of women in this movie: 1) schoolgirls (even Supergirl becomes a schoolgirl in this, for no good reason), 2) background characters (e.g., the bafflingly underused character played by Mia Farrow), and 3) a witch. As if that wasn’t enough, the witch is motivated by sexual attraction to a random guy with few to no character traits, and the plot devolves into a love triangle. With modern eyes, it feels reductive, sexist, and really lazily written, especially since it is for the first-ever American live-action superhero movie with a female lead. I don’t think any of this was Helen Slater’s fault. Slater is perfectly fine in it, Faye Dunaway’s performance is arguably the best thing about it, and Peter O’Toole holds your attention well in the first act. The suit also just looked great. Other than that, there wasn’t a lot that worked about it. It was a dud, and it failed both critically and at the box office back in the 1980s.
I was hopeful that this new version would be an improvement in pretty much every way, but I think it is also fair to say that it has run into some of the same troubles that the Szwarc film did. Critics who viewed the film upon its theatrical release were mixed about it, at best, and baffled by it, at worst, while it became a box office bomb. What other people say about it doesn’t sway me, though, and there are plenty of good films that struggled to get an audience in movie theaters. So, what do I ultimately think about the Milly Alcock-led Supergirl film? Well, I think it is a pretty clear improvement on the ‘original’ film. But while I did have a fine enough time watching the feature, I was also quite underwhelmed by a lot of what I was treated to. It’s ultimately not as bad as its loudest naysayers proclaim, but it also isn’t the unjustly underrated film of the year that its fans may claim.
So, where do I land? Well, here’s what I think really works well about this film. For one, in the first thirty minutes alone, the film asks more of its leading lady than the entire 1984 version did. It’s a much more complex performance that Alcock needs to turn in, and Milly Alcock is solid in this. She does what is asked of her admirably. I’m not sure her arc works as well as intended, though, because the switch to smiley, fully-costumed Supergirl happens in a way that feels unearned. Still, I really like Alcock in this role, and I had fun with the more punk-rock party girl version of the character that we got in the first act. I also think the flashbacks that we get to her childhood are quite good. Admittedly, they’re nowhere near as good as the Krypton scenes in Man of Steel, but they are among the film’s highlights, even if they slow down the pace of the film. The most problematic aspect of the film, though, may be that the best parts of the Supergirl movie are whenever Superman is on-screen. David Corenswet steals the movie away from the rest of the cast in his few scenes.
There are quite a few things that don’t work for the film, though. For one, while Jason Momoa is probably a fine-enough choice for the role of Lobo, he is not good in this film. His performance is neither menacing nor amusing, and he takes away from what should be the focus of the film. Then there’s the action, which is over-edited and has so many cuts that you lose clarity of action. Although it is a wildly different film from the 1984 film, it is, however, still a wildly unoriginal film. It’s got an unmistakable True Grit structure and elements of films like Mad Max: Fury Road, but the film pulls off these aspects in underwhelming ways. However, I think my biggest problem with the film is the chosen style of the world and the visuals. It really just feels like Craig Gillespie decided to make an imitation of a James Gunn Guardians of the Galaxy film, but with none of the heart or the sense of how to elevate the film with music. There’s a really awkward needle-drop late in the film, the main villain is bland and uninteresting, and the many references to Earth make no sense in the world of this film. I could go on. It’s also just a shame that it looks so dull with its brown and yellow color palette. So, on the whole, while Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is an improvement on the 1984 film of the same name, it is still, however, wildly unoriginal and uneven. I don’t think it’s actively bad, but it isn’t special. It’s bland.
5.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
