PREMISE
Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home.
THE GOOD STUFF
MILLY ALCOCK – About as good a casting as you can get. I know some people have seen this movie ahead of time and say that Sasha Calle had a better turn as Supergirl, which is laughably false. Alcock does everything that is absolutely required for this to work. We’ve seen our fair share of superheroes by this point, and having yet another wisecracking smart-ass superhero might get annoying after a while to some audiences. But the flashback sequence in the second act of this film does prove that Alcock has the kind of gravitas as a performer to carry this character into the future.
JASON MOMOA – Jason Momoa steals every scene of this film that he is in with the greatest of ease. At this point, if a movie is not directly starring him, he tends to steal every scene he’s in, regardless of the genre. When this movie was announced, and Lobo was confirmed as a character who was going to be here, there were fans everywhere pointing DIRECTLY at Momoa to play him, and from what I understood, as a man who is not familiar with the character at all, he was pretty much the only dude on the list to play him. This is for a good reason. He’s one of those actors with endless amounts of charisma, with such particular idiosyncrasies that you can apply them to a wide array of popular films, and he’ll fit in every time. That is most definitely the case here.
THE JAMES GUNN AESTHETIC – Yes, I know he does not direct this film, but this is a DCU film, and I can’t help but believe he has some influence over how this thing looks on screen. At this point, aside from Wes Anderson, I don’t know if there’s a filmmaker with a more identifiable cinematic aesthetic than James Gunn. And like with Wes Anderson, I’ll go ahead and say it is always a wonderful thing to see on a big screen. SUPERGIRL looks incredible. It is a feast for the eyes in a very low-key way.
MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS – His performance in this movie is definitely better than the material he’s given. He does his job in creating a villain whom you hate because he is aggravating. Everything about this character is extremely annoying. Not menacing. Not scary. Intentional and wonderfully executed annoyingness. This is worth mentioning because there’s a good chance he’ll get the most flak for what happens in this movie because…
THE BAD STUFF
THIS VILLAIN – ….. Krem of the YELLOW HILLS is a charisma vacuum. There is nothing really compelling about him. He is said to have the strength of 10,000 men, which is a laughable lie. Whenever Lobo and Supergirl are working together as a team, this villain takes a back seat, to say the least, and I don’t know if it should be that way when it comes to a superhero summer movie.
RUTHYE KNOLL – At this point, we’ve seen enough superhero babysitter plot lines to come away with the idea that the young person being babysat usually doesn’t come off that well on screen. This character exists to elicit enough sympathy from Supergirl to stop her from feeling sorry for herself. I cannot imagine an overarching story involving this character that would blend with the DCU. This character is here to get in trouble and to be saved over and over and over again. With every action set piece this movie has, predicting the moment when she would find herself in a catastrophic situation and have to be saved by someone became predictable. Not exactly the charisma vacuum that Krem is… but close. She does have her nice and funny moments. It’s just that none of them ever lead anywhere.
THE UGLY STUFF
It would be spoiler territory to go into the details of the movie in general, but it is not a spoiler to say that Supergirl’s escape from her planet before it got destroyed is well known by this point. (It is said in the trailer, actually.) I expected to see the sequence at some point in the movie, but I didn’t expect the execution of this part of the story, which left a gaping plot hole that stuck with me for the duration of the film. And because it’s spoiler territory, I guess I can’t say what I want to say.
But what I can say is this: if you’re one of those movie fans out there who truly believed that Jack could have fit on the door with Rose in TITANIC (as I do), then you will know the exact moment in this flashback that bothers me so much.
I’m slowly concluding that there are very few things in the world more overrated than the concept of the “summer movie.” It’s easy to look at the box office numbers since the beginning of May, see smash hits to and fro, and give the credit to the fact that those numbers exist because they were released during the summer for no reason other than a release date. Sequels like TOY STORY 5 and DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 would be successful no matter what part of the year they were released in. Movies like OBSESSION and BACKROOMS are often credited as “summer movies,” which is a bit of a stretch. Movies like SUPERGIRL, THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU are legitimate summer tentpoles by every measure. In both cases, these films (AS WELL AS A LOT OF FILMS OF SIMILAR SIZE AND BUDGETS) play it extremely safe.
I get the impression that there’s a common fatigue with the safety these movies provide. It’s not that releasing this movie was such a bad idea. It’s just that we know no risks are going to be taken, it’s going to be really run-of-the-mill stuff that’s a remix of something we’ve seen before, and it’s going to play out exactly how you think it is. SUPERGIRL is fun, but not too fun. It’s not boring, but it’s not exciting. It’s just the cinematic equivalent of unsalted French fries.
Believe me, we’ve seen worse superhero movies than this by far. Because I feel it’s going to become the cool thing to do, people are going to put this among the likes of ELEKTRA, CATWOMAN, MORBIUS, and the Joss Whedon Justice League movie.
Y’all need to relax. It’s nowhere near that atrocious.
It’s playing in theatres now.
