Jonah Naplan June 24, 2026
The easy way to open my one-and-a-half star review of “Supergirl,” the second entry in James Gunn’s reinvented DC Universe after last summer’s “Superman,” would be to tell you that it “never really takes flight,” an appropriate turn-of-phrase cleverly used by many critics in response to the film already. Those same critics, however, have neglected to add that not only does the movie “never really take flight,” but it never really does anything…period. This new comic book movie is one of the most bored and worn-out I’ve ever seen.
Based on the eight-issue comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, the movie follows the adventures of 23-year-old Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), who spends her nomadic days wandering aimlessly around the galaxy, only stopping to get drunk at various extraterrestrial watering holes, all with her trusty dog Krypto by her side. Her wastrel, “punkish” existence is soon turned upside down when a young girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) stumbles into a bar where she’s been partying and demands attention. This tween’s family has just been slaughtered by alien outlaw Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), and she vows bloody revenge, persuading a reluctant Kara to help her.
In the initial pursuit of the Big Bad, however, Krem and his goons hijack Kara’s ship and shoot Krypto with a deadly poison that will stop his heart in 72 hours. And so, naturally, Kara and Ruthye join forces on a planet-hopping quest for vengeance and for the antidote to the poison, which ensures that Krypto, who was such a highlight of “Superman,” gets relegated to only being a mere cameo at the beginning and the end. Doggone it.
Directed by Craig Gillespie, working from a script by Ana Nogueira, “Supergirl” shows its true colors from the very first scene as the movie tries to rhyme Kara’s careless mode of meandering through life with a fierce promotion of feminism that the rest of this adventure never really puts a fine point on. Ever since the solid “Wonder Woman” from almost a decade ago, modern female-centric superhero stories have been hellbent on delivering exclamatory feminist undertones as a side dish to the main course of explosions and noisy butt-kicking. In the case of “Supergirl,” Kara’s unkempt appearance and drunken livelihood seems to be this movie’s way of revolting against “the system.” If it didn’t feel so forced and had gotten developed further, then maybe it would have been effective. But like everything else in “Supergirl,” you just can’t take it seriously.
As Kara and Ruthye soar across the galaxy, the movie neglects almost every opportunity to make something of their dynamic. The two are bound by their shared desire for vengeance against Krem, but not once do they engage in any sort of meaningful conversation about trauma or grief. Instead, their interactions read as mechanical, almost like contractually obligated sequences of dialogue that advance the plot but never our understanding of the characters. It’s particularly disappointing for Gillespie, whose previous directorial work on “I, Tonya” and “Cruella” did a stellar job of illustrating similarly badass women who used their wits to overcome boundaries and exceed expectations. With “Supergirl,” however, it’s almost as if the filmmakers didn’t think the duo could carry the movie on their own, so they ushered in Lobo (Jason Momoa)—a chaotic mercenary who, at times, just feels like a riff on the actor’s previous work as Aquaman—to keep things exciting.
The effort, though, has precisely the opposite effect, and the action sequences unfold like a frenetic video game, muddled rather than stylized, despite Momoa clearly having a blast returning to his rowdy muscleman roots and riding the hell out of his “space hog” motorcycle. None of the action in “Supergirl” is dynamic; it’s only there because it has to be, and it’s certainly not very fun to watch. Worst of all, the battles, from the mid-movie interludes to the obligatory climactic one, try to interweave that smarmy camaraderie patented by the MCU between the punches, and it all falls horribly flat. There was a total of one laugh during my screening, and it was in the first five minutes.
Ironically, the best parts of “Supergirl” are the brief appearances by Kara’s better-known cousin Superman (David Corenswet), and the flashbacks to the collapse of her birthplace, a metropolis of Krypton called Argo City. This movie posits that decades after Clark was sent to Earth in an escape pod, Kara’s parents Zor-El (David Krumholtz) and Alura In-Ze (Emily Beecham) made the same heartbreaking decision. There’s a brief, promising moment in Nogueira’s script where it seems like the movie is about to explore how Kara and Clark’s separate upbringings resulted in them turning out to be completely different superheroes—something that Kara also teases to Ruthye at a break in the action—but it never fully goes there, leaving us to the comics and Wiki pages to do our own deep dive.
It’s neither Alcock nor Ridley’s fault that their characters just aren’t interesting at all. The script has them repeating the same revenge-soaked platitudes over and over again, never giving them any more personality beyond their basic, plot-driven desires. The talented Schoenaerts is equally betrayed by one of the most forgettable, nondescript villains of the 2020s, a character whose motives aren’t clear from the very beginning and who never manages to become a formidable presence within the action setpieces. The look of the entire movie seems to be a sludgy fusion of every “Star Wars” and Marvel project ever made, complete with Mos Eisley Cantina and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” leftovers as background extras. It’s murky, colorless, and no fun to look at.
I think “Supergirl” is going to bomb at the box office. Not only is it bad, but the marketing has been minimal. “Superman,” at least, had the word of mouth. This will not. It would be a different story if in spite of its surface-level characterization and ugly design, the movie was still fun and entertaining, but such is not the case. On the contrary, I suppose you could say that “Supergirl,” well, never really takes flight.
"Supergirl" opens in theaters on June 26th.