Kara’s Game
‘Supergirl’ is going to get unfairly dunked on because ewww, girls, but this girl kinda rocks.
Supergirl
Director: Craig Gillespie • Writer: Ana Nogueira, based on the DC comic
Starring: Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa
USA • 1hr 48mins
Opens Hong Kong June 24 • IIA
Grade: B
Supergirl – and Wonder Woman, and Black Widow, and Batwoman and Barbara Gordon and I’ll stop now – has never quite gotten the movie respect her cousin Kal-El did. Alert the media, a woman is defined by her relationship to some dude (kin, apprentice, brutalised girlfriend) and determined less critical. It’s the oldest story in the book and I can hear the fanboys already shrieking about feminists and woke mobs and reverse sexism or some shit for even mentioning it. But it’s a fact of life for 51% of the population and the fanboys can STFU. Even when the gurls get their moment it’s with less cash, fewer resources and review bombs before a frame of film has even been shot.
Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is far from a masterpiece, but it’s the best interpretation of Supergirl across media that are not comic books ever – no shade to poor Helen Slater who was straight up jilted by Christopher Reeve in 1984. At least David Corenswet’s Clark makes an appearance to chat with his cuz, Kara Zor-El but, wisely, not be a focus of her story. And it is her story; a recognisable, entirely current spin on modern womanhood with a dash of the requisite comic book movie trauma thrown in for good measure. Gillespie does a much better job wrangling the gleeful goofiness that underpins superheroics and cartoons than he did in the bloated and messy Cruella, and taps his I, Tonya and Pam & Tommy sensibilities to conjure the spirit of James Gunn’s DC Studios. Gooey creatures and beasties populate Kara’s world, ultimately making the film an outlandish space opera, just one powered by a troubled who is fresh out of fucks to give. Supergirl isn’t half the movie it is without Milly Alcock, best known as the young Rhaenyra Targaryen on House of the Dragon, as Supergirl, and almost every highlight is 100% down to her charm, snark and simmering mix of rage and sorrow that she juggles with ease. It’s an imperfect but fun ride, and it deserves the grace we keep giving they boys when they screw up a bit.
A total mess
Supergirl is cursed with a lot of the same ills as most films like it, chiefly that it’s visually derivative on a massive scale, even though the core story has been lifted from the 2021 comic Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow by Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. It ditches Gunn’s Crayola aesthetic to trade in the broken down, gritty industrial galaxies of everything from Star Wars to Hardware, with nods of Mad Max: Fury Road, Gunn’s Suicide Squad and all volumes of Guardians of the Galaxy. But relatively green writer Ana Nogueira, who has some mid-range television and a few short films to her credit, has juiced Kara with solid character nuance; she’s a messy bitch. Her Supergirl draws a line between nice, kind and good and has her treat them as three independent notions. Which they are and which girls rarely get to indulge. It’s a complement to Kara as a wounded 23-year-old still wrestling with a huge personal loss that she witnessed and that Kal-El didn’t, giving him the freedom to be a goody goody. And it sets up a nice dynamic between the Supers for Man of Tomorrow.
For the time being Kara is drinking her way through her birthday week off Earth when she crosses paths with Ruthye “Stay in the house Carl” Knoll (Eve Ridley), who of course is full of unearned spit and piss on her revenge kick. Local scumbag Krem of the Yellow Hills (Not Vladimir Putin, Matthias Schoenaerts, The Old Guard, Amsterdam) murdered her family and she’s out for blood. Ruthye is the barely teenaged character there purely to do stupid shit that Kara has to fix, and in doing so fix herself. Fine. Whatever. Kara initially blows Ruthye off, but then Krem shoots Krypto, her loyal superpooch, and it’s on. She goes full John Wick on his ass.
Supergirl is strongest when it’s not superheroing. Surprise, surprise, the ADHD CGI fight scenes are as dizzying and unfathomable as ever, the anti-physics are jarring, the villain is moderately threatening and it’s all very familiar if you’ve come out from under a rock in the last 20 years. When we get to flash back to the destruction of Krypton, Kara’s life as a refugee, the slow death of her people, her outsider status on Earth and the agony of it all she still lives with (enter your own refugee metaphor at any point) are the film at its best, largely because Alcock is so effortlessly engaging. Kara’s never just a bitch, never just mopey. She knows right from wrong and she acts on it, but she’s also angry at the universe and when she lets loose the laser eyes, there’s real rage behind it. Let a sister be angry.
And despite the hyperactive effects and occasionally random plot points that feel thrown in to “connect the dots” there are some stellar set pieces and inspired comedy. The space shuttle bus sequence might be the standout, but never has “This tastes like shit” been more loaded and hilariously tossed off. And any time Jason Momoa deigns to dress up in gonzo make-up and methed out biker leather gear to go way over the top he’s more than welcome. His turn as the long-awaited (?), highly anticipated (?) bounty hunter Lobo is like that last bit of seasoning sprinkled in the stew at the last minute. You may not need it, it may put some of us off, but you have to admit it makes the stew a tad tastier. If we’re going to continue to be subjected to these movies, Momoa needs to be hamming it up in all of them for eight minutes.