DC Studios’ second outing under James Gunn is already drawing a hard first read, and it is not a gentle one. A new review of Supergirl puts Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El at the center of a film that wants speed, attitude and noise, but is said to stumble on the basics.
That matters now because Supergirl arrives in the same lane as the earlier Superman reboot, which left behind mixed reactions last summer and a long argument about what this new DC world wants to be. Alcock, 26, plays Kara as an interplanetary drunk in a Blondie T-shirt, a choice that is meant to signal danger and rebellion before the story even starts moving.
The review gives the plot a blunt shape. Krypto the superdog opens the film by peeing on a newspaper headline about Superman saving a small town, then gets shot with a poison dart that will kill him in 72 hours. Kara has the same 72 hours to track down the antidote, which turns the movie into a race rather than a drift. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem of the Yellow Hills, a human trafficker who leads the Brigands, while Ruthye Marye Knoll watches him slaughter her entire family. Her father is described as an artisan of weapons, which gives the story a grim inheritance even before the chase really takes hold.
But the movie’s bigger problem may be the tone it is chasing. It wants a punk-rock attitude, yet the review argues that calling something punk rock can make it cringe, and that split hangs over the whole thing. The same complaint reaches back to the earlier Superman movie, where Clark Kent called what he does punk rock during a 12-minute argument with Lois Lane. That scene was already a marker of how loudly this new DC universe likes to announce itself; Supergirl appears to turn that volume up without fixing the writing underneath it.
So the film’s immediate question is not whether it is trying to be brash. It is whether that brashness covers a weak script and a flat dystopian setting long enough for Kara’s 72-hour search to matter. If the race for the antidote is the engine, the review suggests the engine is running on style, and style alone may not carry Supergirl past its opening shot.
