Released: 25th June
Seen: 25th June
Roughly one year ago, Superman returned to us. After the absolute disaster that was the DCU, we were given a Superman who cares and there was much rejoicing. It was a genuinely charming movie with one of the best Superman actors we’ve had since the Christopher Reeve-era and I do not say that lightly. I named that film the second best film of 2025 and the performance of Superman was my third favourite performance in that same year. It was a genuinely great work of art that showed that there was space in the modern era for a kinder sweeter Superman. The ending of that film had a brief moment for Supergirl (Milly Alcock) who came to collect her dog Krypto and showed that this universe’s Supergirl was a bit of a drunken disaster who we would eventually get to spend an entire movie following. It was exciting, it seemed like it should be fun and now that film has come out and… it’s OK, it’s a genuinely OK movie but it should be so much better than OK.
Supergirl begins with Supergirl celebrating her 23rd birthday by going to planets with red suns (which dampens her powers somewhat) so she can get wasted. While on one of these pub crawls she happens upon a young girl named Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) who is the last surviving member of her family and seeks revenge against the creature that murdered them. That creature is Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), a complete asshole who takes what he wants along with his crew and often what he wants to take is random young women so they can do exactly the thing you think a crew of monstrous men would do to a bunch of captured young women. Oh, and Krem also poisons Supergirl’s dog at one point, the actual inciting incident of the film that causes Supergirl to drag Ruthye along with her so she can get the antidote to the poison that is slowly killing Krypto, the bestest dog ever… also at some point they run into Lobo (Jason Momoa) who wants to collect the bounty on one of the people in Krem’s crew, it’s important but not directly related to the main plot, which is kind of a problem this film has.
To be clear from the jump, Supergirl is nowhere near as good as Superman was, which is a shame because it had all the elements to make for a really good fun film, it just overloaded itself with pointless garbage. There is a fair amount this film does well, it’s often visually spectacular with bold uses of colours that really help give the film a bold look that’s easy to enjoy. Some shots are downright gorgeous, Supergirl floating in space just waiting for the yellow sun to hit her is a captivating visual that elevates one of the best scenes in the film. The creative blocking of a scene and how the camera captures certain moments all help make for some great set pieces that show off how different Supergirl is as a fighter compared to her Metropolis-based cousin. Just in terms of spectacle there’s a lot to be enjoyed here.
It must also be said that most of the performances are really good. Milly Alcock is delivering a more rough-around-the-edges superhero than we’re used to seeing. She’s likely to just stagger off the screen any second to get another beer and you can tell she’s just not all there, but that makes her kind of fascinating, especially in comparison to the big blue boy scout we saw a year ago. In terms of characters, Superman is composed while Supergirl is held together with half-used sticky tape and that makes her interesting. Lobo is also a genuinely great character, he gets maybe 15 minutes in total but this is Jason Momoa in hammy villain mode and anyone who has seen Fast X will tell you that hammy villain mode is the best thing Jason Momoa can do. If the film was just those two chasing after a bad guy who hurt Krypto, it would be a fantastic film, but unfortunately, there’s a third wheel we just can’t shake off.
I don’t want to be mean to Eve Ridley who did her best with what she’d been given, but I haven’t seen a main character as useless as Ruthye in my entire life. If you want an example of a character who adds absolutely nothing of value to a film, look no further because I have the ultimate example right here. At least slasher film body count characters are there to look cool when they die, at least comic relief characters tell the occasional joke, Ruthye comes in to give us a second reason to want to get to the main bad guy (a reason that, frankly, isn’t as emotionally resonant as saving the dog we recently spent an entire movie falling in love with) and doesn’t do anything of value to help find him. She can’t fight, she doesn’t have any secret information, she has no real skills of any kind and she’s not particularly charming, so we feel the urge to see her protected. She’s there, she gets shoved into a corner while Supergirl does all the work and her story arc is non-existent. It feels like maybe she was meant to have some big moment that got cut along the way, some emotionally resonant scene that’s just never shown to the audience but instead she’s just a constant annoyance that is useless at best and gets in the way at worst.
It also doesn’t help that the film is not very well edited, scene transitions in particular just feel wrong. Some shots feel like they’re cut just a fraction too late and it throws off the timing, jokes that should work based on the edit just kind of suffer from whatever’s been done to it. Its pacing is all over the place, moments that should feel quick and energetic just linger for a little too long and meanwhile the moments where you should linger on something for an emotional beat just get cut short. It’s already having to fight the feeling of being over stuffed with plots, it didn’t need to be coming apart at the seams because of that stuffing.
Then there’s the writing which goes between being genuinely quite good and occasionally just bad. It’s not even the dialogue that’s an issue, dialogue in these films should be big and dramatic because it’s goddamn comic books. It’s basic things like how they shoehorn in Supergirl’s backstory, the fact that Lobo is after a completely different person than our main characters (to the point where I literally thought I was just misunderstanding what the main villain’s name was) or even just the overall story arc that we’re building towards. I’m not about to spoil the ending but it’s not exactly an end that fits well with what’s come beforehand. Once you learn that this is writer Ana Nogueira’s first feature film script it makes sense because clearly she had a lot of ideas but didn’t work out which ones to use or how to put them together properly because the script itself has a lot of problems that just hurt the film.
Now again, I must stress that the film is still enjoyable in no small part because of the lead performance, how much fun Lobo is as a character and the visuals. It’s got enough genuinely great action scenes that help it out, plus a fair few major scenes where you can see what they were going for. Supergirl is not a bad movie, it’s average at best but it’s nowhere near the worst this franchise has gotten. It’s a shame that after such a strong start they’ve stumbled like this, but hopefully this is a blip and not a sign of things to come. I wanted this to be better than it was, I think everyone (at least, those who aren’t annoying Snyderbros) wanted this to be better than it is. Maybe the next solo outing for Supergirl will match those hopes but for now… it’s fine, I guess
Movie Meister Reviews 