Well, now we know for certain that Supergirl (2026) was a box office flop. Damn shame, that. I’ve loved the character since I was a kid, particularly in her adventures with the Legion of Super-Heroes (natch), and I was really hoping for something wonderful on-screen. I wish I could say that my opinion defied the wisdom of the crowds and that the movie was great, but alas its box office performance is probably a fair indicator of its quality.
The movie’s just not good.
Look, Milly Alcock is charming as all get-out and when she turns it on, she turns it on. Her Kara Zor-El has the makings of a great movie character, but the script hamstrings her with a series of incredibly jejune choices that don’t let her sing.
Jason Momoa as Lobo is exactly what you would want and what you would expect. No quibbles here.
Other than that… Yeesh. The cast in this movie is not good. David Krumholtz’s Zor-El is pretty good, but from the villains to the allies to the ancillary characters, the film is a dud. No shade on the actors — the script just doesn’t deliver for them. Even Krypto, whose shenanigans eventually won me over in Superman (2025), is dull here, spending most of the movie…lying down.
The villain of the piece — the imaginatively named Krem — is right out of the Generic Evil Villain Handbook (1984 edition). Krem majored in facial piercings in college, with a minor in mustache-twirling. There is nothing even remotely interesting about this character. Nothing that makes him memorable or distinct. He and his crew of ne’er-do-wells just seem to like killing and torturing for the sake of killing and torturing. Oh, and they run a sex trafficking ring on the side because this movie is for…who?
Seriously. Who is this movie for? My tween daughter is the prime audience for the girl power message…but seemed freaked out by the very casual asides about, you know, child sex slavery. Girls her age rounded up and called brides and…
Like, really? Space Epstein and his pals? That’s what we’re showing girls? That if you don’t have super-powers you’re a victim from jump?
OK. Sure.
Look, this isn’t a full-fledged review. The time is long past for that. But I have things to say and this is my blog, so I’m gonna say them.
Supergirl: Murderer
So…that happened. Supergirl straight up murders a dude in cold blood. Right. Great.
I agree philosophically that Krem is too damn evil to let live, and I also agree that Ruthye couldn’t kill him, thematically, AND I further agree that having him die incidentally or by his own actions would be a cop-out.
But you’ve got Lobo RIGHT THERE! Come on!
Imagine Kara is about to kill Krem. First she slashes him with the sword. “That’s for poisoning my dog! And this… This is for what you did to that girl!”
And she swings…
And Lobo photobombs the execution, slipping in and ripping Krem’s head off his shoulders. Laughing.
“I didn’t think you’d do it!” he chortles. “And you know what? I still don’t! You would have pussied out at the last second.”
“No! I was going to kill him!” Supergirl protests.
“Well, now you’ll never know!” And Lobo rides off, laughing his Czarnian ass off.
Of course, you can’t fix this movie just by fixing its ending. A friend of mine who’s a screenwriter told me that the movie is basically just the outline of a story, not a story itself, and that jibes for me. It very much has “And then this! And then this!” energy, a series of bullet points connected by…nothing.
Look up out
The whole movie was sold on a vibe. “She’s edgy!” And then her “edge” is…getting drunk and being sarcastic. Yawn. Seen it before. Like Dark Willow said: Bored now.
The whole movie was paint-by-numbers super-hero sci-fi. Its color palette, its design, its entire aesthetic could have been plugged into almost any other super-hero movie. Krem and his crew looked like slightly more sinister versions of Griff Tannen’s gang from Back to the Future II. I kept waiting for something new and exciting and original and innovative, and the film kept shoveling slop I’ve seen a million times before onto my plate. Bleh.
Needle Drops
Stop it. Please. Just… Just stop it. Stop the goddamn needle drops, OK? I know this isn’t a James Gunn movie, but his fingerprints are all over it, and the needle drops just…
Please. I’m begging you. Stop.
The Good
Was there good in the movie? Sure. Like I said, when she was allowed to be charming and charismatic, Milly Alcock brought the heat. And I was beyond thrilled to see Argo City in live action. I honestly never thought for a single second that Hollywood would have the guts to say, “Yeah, the planet blew up, but this one city survived…” They really adhered (mostly) to Supergirl’s comic book origins, and I’m both shocked and pleased.
And hey — nicely done with avoiding the question of why Kara never told Clark his parents were doucherockets. She never knew them and she was born so long after they died that it probably never came up. Bonus points for Alura’s off-hand comment indicating Jor-El was slightly nuts, meaning all Kryptonians in the DCU aren’t/weren’t bigoted asshats. Just Superman’s dad. Which is still a problem, but not as big a problem.
I really wanted to like this movie. Fortunately, it didn’t do anything fatal to the character, and I genuinely look forward to seeing Alcock in future DCU films.
On to Clayface…