Supergirl

Forty-odd years after a much-derided and best forgotten debut, The Girl of Steel gets a second bite of the big blockbuster cherry with this cheeky action-packed solo adventure. The uncluttered plot has a stronger throughline than in many such superhero epics, demonstrating commendable reluctance to pin the fate of the entire universe on her admittedly invulnerable shoulders.

Because almost all the action takes place on alien planets far, far away, more pressure is put on star Milly Alcock to be a focus of emotional investment for the audience. Then again, no matter how alien some of the aliens she encounters look, they all speak English and behave much like humans. In a Star Wars cantina-type scene, one of them even sings “The Girl From Ipanema”.

Alcock takes the ‘punk rock’ credo from James Gunn’s 2025 reboot of her famous cousin rather more literally; she’s a recognisably normal young woman who wants to go clubbing, get drunk, then come home and play with her dog Krypto. Interestingly in terms of character, and conveniently in terms of plotting, her powers even glitch in and out depending on her current proximity to a yellow sun.

With the assistance of used-future set and vehicle designs and colourful, neon-tinged photography, Supergirl comes off more like Star-Lord from Gunn’s Marvel hit Guardians Of The Galaxy. But although the film borrows a number of riffs from other sci-fi adventures, its own melody has a distinctive edge of both darkness and (super)humanity.

Plotwise it’s all very simple, and the film is all the better for it. Playing power chords on our heartstrings, it kicks off with Krypto’s life being threatened by Matthias Schoenærts’s psychopathic brigand Krem, all lip-smacking evil and a face full of ball bearings.

On her quest to retrieve the adorable super-mutt from the brink, Supergirl teams up with Eve Ridley’s earnest and brutally orphaned teen Ruthye and with Jason Momoa’s Lobo, a vicious and immortal bounty hunter with an endearingly bad attitude who looks like Alice Cooper on steroids. It’s pretty much a tie between him and Alcock herself for who’s the best thing in the film.

To her credit, writer Ana Nogueira cuts as much fat from her script as she can get away with, leaving us with a buoyant, finely-tuned hot rod of a movie that wants general audiences to have a good time, while hoping that even the most picky DC fans will appreciate its fidelity to the source material in spirit, if not in every single detail.

Nogueira does throw in a few standard-issue gags and one-liners, but they seem to emerge from character rather than having been fuel-injected as a response to test audience scores. Besides, she also finds room to drop origin-story breadcrumbs that nourish us with Supergirl’s psychological motivation, and director Craig Gillespie has form in making humour seem a natural part of drama.

Action sequences echo with a selection of mostly twenty-first-century Terran pop music (sadly excluding XTC’s “That’s Really Super, Supergirl”), and are shot and edited with no small amount of dynamism and élan. But more importantly, they carry a sense of dramatic momentum coming from the needs of the heroine, instead of feeling like they’re only there to distract the audience from their phones.

Supergirl takes a sassy and entertaining detour from the typical hero’s journey, sounding the usual bells and whistles of the superhero genre as a sort of high-energy character study, without forgetting to satisfy the demands of the popcorn-munching crowd. By rights it should make a star out of its lead actress, who provides an agreeably scruffy role model for young female viewers starved of such a thing, and she makes it looks as effortless as outrunning a speeding bullet.

-Stew Mott-