This is not a review I am taking any joy in writing. As a longtime fan of James Gunn’s work and someone who harbored immense hope for his bold new take on the DC universe, as well as someone who absolutely abhors what is currently happening in the more radical and politically minded circles surrounding this movie, I had every reason to like this film. And yet, I cannot deny the simple truth: director Craig Gillespie’s ‘Supergirl’ is not good.
TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “SUPERGIRL”
5. A Compromised Script
The screenplay for Supergirl, as officially credited to Ana Nogueira, is a bizarre mishmash of motives, none of which feel substantial enough to have driven this film to completion on their own. Instead, it feels as if a fundamentally broken foundation was already laid, and then the creative team kept slapping additional structures on top of it, hoping they would somehow balance out in the end. Sadly, the opposite is true, as the entire film collapses into a loose collection of unfinished ideas.
This is a film that is simultaneously trying to adapt Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic run, tell Supergirl’s full origin story, expand on some of the Krypton-related narrative elements left out of Superman, introduce Jason Momoa as Lobo in an extended cameo, and plant seeds for James Gunn’s upcoming Superman sequel, all while masquerading as a bargain-bin Guardians of the Galaxy. The result is a story that constantly steps on its own toes and undermines its own themes while delivering an underwhelming, overly familiar core plot.
4. The Music is Rough
In the months leading up to its release and throughout several advanced test screenings of this film, Supergirl changed musical composers multiple times. This is uncommon, but not necessarily a death sentence for the film; there was every chance that the score Claudia Sarne delivered for the final cut would be more than adequate. However, that is not the case.
Not only does Sarne’s score largely miss the mark (not her fault, as she was working under a very compressed timeline), but the film’s additional music elements, such as its copious amount of needle drops, feel abhorrently miscalculated. There are multiple times where the entire flow of a sequence is thrown so far out of whack by an out-of-nowhere song being cued up that it becomes difficult to stomach. The worst offender of the bunch is a mid-climax number that is so egregious, it doubles as an unintentional satire of Gunn’s very worst tendencies. It feels less like a project James Gunn is actually involved with and more like one that was deliberately aping his style, à la 2016’s Suicide Squad. That’s not company you want to be in.
3. The Action is Atrocious
I cannot, for the life of me, even begin to wrap my head around the colossal disaster that is Supergirl’s action. There are two settings to the action sequences, each of which are distinctly bad in their own ways. The first is the more dominant of the two: standard coverage. Here, for some reason, Gillespie and co. have decided to completely abandon the 180-degree rule and instead constantly break the line, willy-nilly, throughout the fights. This confuses everything from screen direction to spatial relations, geography, and beyond. Exacerbating these issues is the awful editing, which is overworked to a comical degree and makes the whole thing even more difficult to competently follow, much less feel on any impactful level.
The second type of action in Supergirl is the faux oners, of which there are a couple. These go in the opposite direction, capturing a bunch of action all in “one take.” I put that in quotes because these are so clearly and egregiously digitally augmented and stitched together in the sloppiest fashion imaginable. It’s impossible to buy into the central conceit of these shots, because the seams are so glaringly apparent from the get-go.
The end result is an action film full of set pieces that are noisy, janky, and regularly unpleasant to look at.
2. The Lead Performances are Strong
What makes Supergirl’s overall quality all the more disappointing is how much talent is on display here. Milly Alcock is great as Kara, Jason Momoa is clearly having a ball as a Beetlejuice-meets-Jack Nicholson-inspired Lobo, David Corenswet further hones in on the ideal cinematic vibe for Superman. Rob Hardy’s cinematography, when allowed to be practical and given any room to breathe, can be quite stellar.
But the film undercuts these positives at every turn.
1. Not What the DCU Needs
When Superman came out last year, it was far from perfect, but it at least felt like a step in the right direction; like James Gunn and co. understood that a new approach to the superhero genre was needed in order for it to resonate with modern audiences. That film, with its surprisingly prescient political angle and hopeful themes, felt like the beginning of something new. In stark contrast, Supergirl feels like something that was left rotting in the back of the fridge when the previous batch of DC creatives cleared out, which Gunn and co. discovered and figured they could spruce up with some fresh condiments and hope no one would be the wiser.
The result is a bad film that could prove outright detrimental to Gunn’s DCU. It feels so completely like a relic of the past that it risks losing any and all goodwill this cinematic universe venture has going for it. More than anything, though, I would have just liked Milly Alcock to get to truly shine in a great Supergirl film; it’s a fascinating character with a great performer who deserves a genuinely great film. Sadly, that is not what this is.
RGM GRADE
(D)
What could have easily been an easy layup for Gunn and co. in the aftermath of last year’s Superman is instead a painfully malnourished and misshapen project that feels woefully out of step with anything resembling what a modern audience might be looking for in a superhero film in 2026.
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