If you think you get red-eyed when you’re drunk…

Previously on the all-new DC Universe: With last year’s Superman, James Gunn admirably rebooted Warner Bros’ big-screen superhero canon that kept putting the “League” in “beleaguered” with every new misfire. Rather than fully suppress the bad-boy edginess of his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy — which worked for that particular motley crew, don’t get me wrong — Gunn shrewdly tapped humankind’s self-inflicted age of cynicism as a chief antagonist to the Big Blue Boy Scout’s superpowered optimism. He wasn’t necessarily renouncing “attitude” as a marketing mood, so much as he was conceding there are other ways to approach conflicts in modern life. In his own way, he celebrated Supes’ innate idealism more than any other feature filmmaker so far this millennium.

As is the procedure for every rebooted superhero timeline, Superman was a bit overstuffed with other faces from the original comics, because every comics-to-screen writer cannot resist grabbing every toy out of the IP toybox for as long as they’re allowed to reach under the lid, and studio execs do love offering lots of character options to their action-figure designers and other merch collaborators. Among the most logical inclusions was his cousin Kara Zor-El, but as played by Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon), her graceless debut had her drunkenly slouching into Supes’ Fortress of Solitude to fetch her furry pal Krypto and make the audience aware she’s no Helen Slater or Melissa Benoist. She’s young, she parties, she’s in-your-face, she’s super coooool just like You, The Viewers at Home! If the Guardians of the Galaxy threw a space kegger, she’d totally be invited and drink everyone under the table!

It’s no surprise that first up for a Superman Spinoff Showcase is Supergirl, which I understand is based on or at least inspired by Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries/trade. I’ve been meaning to read it for years but keep forgetting to buy it, so I have little basis for adaptation comparison and no predisposition toward giving it straight A’s just because I’m a fan of King’s. I bet I’ll like the book a lot better.

The Gist: A teenage girl living on the distant fringes of civilization wants revenge on the varmint who murdered her father. She demands help from the nearest drunkard in sight, who has a formidable skill set but definitely isn’t in the mood for heroics just now. The souse sobers up just enough to consent to tagging along, albeit more for self-serving reasons than any sense of justice or altruism. The duo embarks on a long journey to track down the gang, takes out a few other unrelated criminals along the way, and breaks up because of stubbornness. The teen eventually runs across the killer by pure luck while he’s bathing outdoors, but wastes the opportunity because she’s inexperienced and because the film would be too short if she nailed him then and there. The boozer straightens up just enough to save the day in the end, but if there’d been an AA anywhere in the vicinity, they’d’ve been clearheaded enough to settle this whole affair up front in about ten minutes.

For those of you who play the Poorly Explained Movies board game at home but are too young to recognize this overlong card, the correct answer is True Grit. I was already aware of King and Evely’s earnest homage thanks to my comic-shop dealer, who told me about it years ago. I like both film versions and can’t remember why I didn’t simply buy it from him that very day. Maybe I was over budget that week. Anyway: when a comic pays homage to a classic film, it’s neat to see a work in one medium honoring another. When one movie recycles another classic movie, it’s a little less endearing unless there’s a scene of a hotel clerk or elderly shut-in watching the original on a black-and-white TV in the background.

Nevertheless, director Craig Gillespie (Cruella; I, Tonya) and first-time feature-film writer Ana Nogueira (whose acting credits include The Vampire Diaries and The Blacklist) stick to that proven framework. In this case the space teen named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) also had a mom and brother, but they’re surplus casualties. Matthias Schoenaerts (The Old Guard, Red Sparrow) plays the big-bad Dren, wretched leader of a band of child-trafficking brigands who’s riddled with so many rows of precisely parallel piercings that his face looks like a really shiny nonslip bathtub mat.

And today due to illness the role of Rooster Cogburn will be reluctantly played by Kara Zor-El, one of two last survivors of the destruction of planet Krypton. She’s in space celebrating her birthday parsecs away from her last remaining relative — on a planet with a red sun, which drains Kryptonians of their powers and invulnerability, which means she can get drunk there instead of instantly metabolizing everything she quaffs. It seemed like a good idea to bring Krypto, The Best Dog in the Universe, along on her pan-galactic pub pity party, but when Dren poisons the very good doggo and leaves his life hanging in the balance, then Kara feels motivated to lift a finger and take the evildoer down. Will she stop him? Can she live up to the big red S on her chest? How many innocents will die until and unless she does?

Fortunately, she’s not the only DC Comics character cruising through this galaxy…

The familiar faces: …because when you need a belligerent foil to liven up your just-okay blockbuster shindig, it’s time to call Jason Momoa! The erstwhile Aquaman and the apparent Final Boss in the Fast and the Furious series jumps into a new DC-Earth as the genocidal mercenary space-biker Lobo — that formerly bestselling, over-the-top, one-joke lampoon of ’90s antiheroes who sucks whenever a writer expects us to take him seriously. Momoa seems more at ease in space leather than he was as the King of the Sea and nails every aspect of the Main Man’s most popular rendition — his lust for money, his randomly homicidal moods, his giant meathook-on-a-chain wrapped around his bulging arms, his tricked-out aggro space-cycle, even the goofy way he says “bastich” a lot whenever he’s not in an adults-only story. (If he ever utters his other favorite fake cussword “frag”, my aging ears didn’t catch it.) I thought I’d find Lobo utterly annoying, and yet I felt grateful for his few scenes. He’s almost too easy a fit for Gunn’s DCU.

The film is littered with unhappy parents. David Krumholtz (Oppenheimer, Numbers) and Emily Beecham (Cruella) are Kara’s doomed parents. Ferdinand Kingsley (Silo, The Sandman‘s Hob Gadling) is Ruthye’s dad, a renowned weaponsmith who left behind a super awesome sword that’s light enough for a teen to carry and unsheathe. Kadiff Kirwan (a.k.a. Marcus with the gambling problem from the great Slow Horses) is the desperate father of a kidnapped daughter.

The always recognizable Seth Rogen voices a Babu Frik-ian space-bus copilot/translator. And of course Kara’s famous cousin David Corenswet drops by for a visit.

The Impressions: If nothing else, Supergirl gets brownie points for singing directly to my heart by setting the opening credits to Sleigh Bells’ extremely catchy “This Summer” from my favorite 2025 CD, which I’ve been meaning to write about for some six months and counting. Maybe this is the motivation I need to finish that procrastinated entry.

The young Ridley shows promise in the role of Space Mattie Ross, who’s preternaturally nimble with a sword and understandably unimpressed with most of Kara’s half-hearted “Just say no to murdering!” coaching attempts. The rest of Supergirl, I could take or leave. The sci-fi explosions are standard-issue. Several fight scenes take place mostly offscreen, and/or replace Our Heroine with a flimsy, whizzy CG simulacrum. The final battle has some pretty rip-roaring midair collisions and barnstorming action, up until it brakes hard for a smoggy Zack Snyder cartoon intermission that imitates Mr. Terrific’s biggest Superman scene, with one real actor standing slack-jawed in the middle of wholly animated pandemonium and the soundtrack cues up a Sunday-morning coffeehouse cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” destined to resurface in a cliched movie trailer someday.

The nonstop parade of aliens justifies the Mos Eisley Cantina jokes in every pro-critic review I’ve read. (My son demands to know, given a century-old comics universe with myriad established alien races amid its millions of pages of source material, why the film seems to use exactly zero of them, beyond any cribbed from Woman of Tomorrow.) Spasmodic episodes of julienne-sliced editing whittles long stretches — sometimes even basic chitchat exchanges — into split-second cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut / cut short-attention sandwiches. (See also: the duller fights in Mortal Kombat II.)

Regarding our star: as the very specific version of the character that Gunn and his fellow producers desire here, Alcock is talented enough to capture each facet as the script rotates through them. Unlike either John Wayne or Jeff Bridges, Kara earns an obligatory origin flashback to help explain or rationalize what she’s doing. Comics fans know one or more versions of the tale, but their differences are rarely observed on such an emotionally perceptive level as seen here. Kal-El was a baby when Jor-El and Lara sent him rocketing away toward Earth, so Clark Kent never knew or bonded with them, and consequently took about sixty seconds to reject them after Gunn revealed their space-imperialist twist. Kara, on the other hand, was old enough to know and love her parents for years before she was flown off while they stayed behind and died. (The reason for the timetable difference between the cousins varies with each new timeline.) Hence the birthday binge — she’s still grieving the death of her entire family, apart from the one goody-two-shoes who, she thinks, doesn’t get it.

Whenever she’s baring her soul to us and to others, Alcock is up to the challenge of grappling with grief and eliciting sympathy as a space orphan whose phenomenal powers couldn’t manifest until she’d first lost everything she had. Unfortunately, those moments are in the minority — she spends much of the film depowered, blotto, KO’d, or smirking with self-absorption. She’s a teenage snark machine deflecting most camaraderie attempts and denying the IP’s legacy in favor of connecting with Suicide Squad fanboys or whatever. A perfunctory attempt at giving her an eye-opening Uncle Ben moment gets quickly hand-waved away; toward the end she’s given more room to face her own Man of Steel moment. In a technical sense, the outcome bolsters Superman’s uniqueness while diminishing her own. Cheers to Warner Brothers for prepping Supergirl to lead a Birds of Prey revamp, I suppose. Hopefully it’ll be better than John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn sequel.

(Someday when Superman’s #1 fan Mark Waid isn’t currently writing a dozen different DC series and can resume expressing his thoughts online without fear of professional repercussions, I am dying to know his thoughts on the film.)

The end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Supergirl end credits, but they acknowledge about a dozen comics creators for their contributions, fewer than the average superhero film nowadays. Part of me is relieved they didn’t cram in sixteen extra action-figure options: a perverse and disappointed part of me kinda wishes they had.