A hot mess, 'Supergirl' has a rowdy spirit but a too-terrestrial plot

7 min Click here to listen to this article Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print 0:00 0:00 1x This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) can swill an entire sorority’s supply of booze. As a Kryptonian, her hangovers are instantly cured by a yellow sun. And so director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” follows a trail of empty beer bottles to find Superman’s lonely younger cousin marking her birthday on a solo interstellar bender, pounding shots alongside her dog, Krypto. Unlike sweet-natured Kal-El (David Corenswet), a.k.a. Clark Kent, who escaped Krypton as a baby, this traumatized 20-something bore witness to their home planet’s long and painful extinction. Playing grief like the sandblasted absence of emotion, Alcock’s Supergirl isn’t in the mood for Metropolis do-gooding. She prefers slumming it at extraterrestrial honky-tonks with suitors who look like armadillo-plated slugs. She’s most visibly depressed when she tries to convince herself she’s having fun. Who doesn’t want to go on a “Star Wars” cantina crawl? The opening stretch of “Supergirl” is great — Alcock even passes out on a toilet with aplomb. Briefly we hope that Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira are shaking up the superhero format like a bottle of gas-station champagne. I’d love to see Alcock’s heroine in a grotty, silly “Animal House”-style comedy, out-drinking a galaxy of alien squids. But the limits of Hollywood’s imagination squeeze Supergirl to stop partying and start doing some regular old rescuing. Sigh. Someone’s gotta save franchise movies from themselves. As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful teenager in “True Grit.” Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family. Unlike Supergirl, the child thinks it’s healthier to exorcise — not imbibe — one’s heartache. The duo visit an Epstein-island-like planet of kidnapped breeding women where, in one of the script’s subtler sick horrors, the locals imply that pubescent Ruthye is more valuable than aged 23-year-old Supergirl. (Although some of the caged extras appear to be as ancient as 30.) It’s yet another swiped idea, this one from “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for a minor story beat that’s unnecessary. Still, Alcock reacts with exactly the right note of disdain: “Cool,” she croaks. ‘Nuff said. DC’s James Gunn reminds fans that he’s already explained how Supergirl could have pierced ears with her introduction in ‘Superman.’ They’ve come to this cesspool to find the villainous Krem, an unrecognizably vile Matthias Schoenaerts with a mug that’s been pierced all over like he face-planted into a pile of thumbtacks. His biker-scumbag-times-infinity prosthetic design is fantastic, but what makes it genius is that the makeup team allowed a couple of metal studs to fall off Krem’s forehead before his first close-up. You know, for that lived-in barbarian sex trafficker look. As Ruthye, Ridley’s crisp British elocution is the cleanest thing in the movie, which is shot by Rob Hardy in shades of mustard smog and latrine brown. Neither Supergirl as a babysitter nor Gillespie as a storyteller let the kid carry her share of the action, but I suspect Ridley has the talent for it. She seizes her small opportunities to impress in the film’s second half. Spitting on a baddie, her righteous loogie stings like a moral disinfectant. Meanwhile, Jason Momoa swaggers into the fray from the cover of an ’80s hard-rock album with Kiss’ makeup, Manowar’s muscles and Meatloaf’s motorcycle. His character, a blue-skinned bounty hunter, only tangentially slots into the plot. Really, Momoa’s massive presence is here to prove that James Gunn was serious when he announced he was hard-resetting DC Comics’ film canon up to 2023’s “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.” Momoa as Aquaman is dead. Long live Momoa as Whoever This Guy Is. Gillespie likes to champion difficult women, from Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya” to the Dalmatian-skinning Disney villain of “Cruella.” Yet as his budgets have mounted, so has the pressure to make his problematic ladies popular with a mass audience. “Supergirl” feels anxious to entertain. The jokes all have the same sense of snarky humor, no matter what species is cracking them. One scene even has a comic slow clap that, in my theater, didn’t get a reaction. The camera and cutting pace refuse to relax. Major set-piece action shots are impossible to follow. You can’t squint past the distracting lens flares. Alcock’s wildling Supergirl is the one reason to see the film. As in her too-brief role on the “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” and her rollicking cameo at the end of 2025’s “Superman,”

A hot mess, 'Supergirl' has a rowdy spirit but a too-terrestrial plot

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