REVIEW:
Supergirl is a movie that could have so easily been a lot better. The problems here generally boil down to common sense. No clear or meaningful villain, lousy action, and a wasted character who should have been a much bigger and more integral part of the movie. But let’s start with the good. One thing good about this movie is the way it continues off of Superman, the James Gunn directed movie that kick-started this new relaunch of DC movies.
Gunn might not be the smartest guy out there (these first two movies of his new DC universe have proved that,) but he knows what Marvel did to get the ball rolling with the MCU. He knows about having one movie lead into another. And so he ended Superman with brining in Supergirl, and now here in Supergirl, David Cornswet’s Superman appears in a handful of scenes. That through-line is nice, even if there isn’t necessarily a continued story or quest, the same way Marvel did it (their quest for the infinity stones defined the first few phases of movies.)
What also generally works is Gunn’s style. Now, he didn’t direct Supergirl, but it most definitely looks like he did. This movie goes hard to copy Gunn’s style of needle drop songs times to slow motion action and attempts at mixing humor with dark storylines. Here, there is a plot about child trafficking that almost takes a back seat to everything else going on.
The truth is, this movie starts out pretty solid. Watching Kara (Supergirl,) be reluctant to help. when there’s a girl in crisis at a bar, is a staple for the anti-hero, and Millie Alcock (the actress tapped for Supergirl here,) does a pretty nice job with it. She spends her days on planets that don’t have yellow suns, (the kinds that make her strong,) so that she can get drunk and feel it. When she has to stick up for the girl who is being taken advantage of, she can’t use her superpowers and has to fight a bully alien creature without them. It makes for a pretty cool scene.
In fact, all of the aliens and other-worldly elements in the first few scenes of the movie are pretty good. This includes Seth Rogen voicing an aline bus driver, or bus-driver’s assistant. The aliens look well-thought out and put together, and we get a pirate hijacking of a passenger space ship scene, which is pretty cool. But the movie starts deteriorating shortly afterwards.
This is in large part due to the fact that the villain is entirely forgettable. He wears beads on his face, like all the other members of his gang, and seems more like a henchman or one of the faceless enemy soldiers, than like the actual main villain. He is given no personality and looks like he walked off the set of Mad Max Fury Road, without anything to differentiate himself from any of the other bad guys here.
And then there’s Jason Mamoa as Lobo. What a waste. Momoa is perfect for the part. Only there’s just one problem. Lobo doesn’t fit into this story. And they don’t even try to make him fit. His role here is that he’s going after another bad guy who travels in the same group as our lead bad guy. So he’s not even connected to the main villain or main hero at all. It’s like he’s got his own side quest, only we don’t get to follow much of it. Lobo should have been the main villain of this movie. He should have gotten more time to shine instead of just being an after-thought. He’s thrown in here for no apparent reason at all, and it’s a mess.
So is the second half of this movie, including action scenes that are difficult to follow and incredibly uninteresting. Movies are supposed to ramp things up for the climax and get even more intense. This one does the opposite, daring us to actually care. There were definitely some cool ideas here, mostly in the first portions of the film, but boy did it fall apart after that.