A Recipe With All the Right Ingredients... Just Poor Presentation.

   After the relative success of 2025’s Superman, including a surprise cameo by his famous cousin,  Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, and the revelation that Krypto was actually her dog, it seemed only natural that a Supergirl film would be coming soon. And it did, arriving just a year later amid much buzz with the casting of Jason Mamoa as comic book fan favorite Lobo. As part of the larger DCEU now helmed by James Gunn, Supergirl had all the right ingredients to be successful: a good cast, a big budget, and a guaranteed fanbase. However, the movie itself is an uneven effort at best. It suffers from a conflicting characterization of its title heroine, gross underuse of Mamoa as Lobo, and flat, uninteresting villains.

            Like her famous cousin, Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) is a survivor of the doomed planet Krypton, having escaped with her family after her father put a force field around part of Argo City to survive the explosion of their home planet. Turns out you can take Argo City out of Krypton but not the Kryptonite out of Argo City, and it becomes toxic to the residents. Like his brother before him, Kara’s father sends Kara and her dog to Earth so that she can survive. Once there, also like her cousin, Kara is given superpowers by Earth’s yellow sun. Unlike her cousin, however, Kara does not use her powers to help others, but uses them more to travel the cosmos and drown her Survivor’s Guilt with alien alcohol on planets with red suns. Along the way, she happens upon a young girl looking for vengeance for her family’s murder by a group of Max Maxian villains and encounters the infamous bounty hunter Lobo (Mamoa).

            The ultimate failure of this movie is a tried-and-true mistake that DC has made ever since being beaten to the punch by Marvel at achieving Hollywood blockbuster status: they continue to try and keep up and emulate, long, long after that proverbial ship has sailed. While several of the DC movies that have been successful in the past (Wonder Woman, Shazam, Aquaman, Suicide Squad) have leaned into their quirkiness, the issue with Supergirl is that the filmmakers try too hard to evoke a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe, but this movie lacks the incredible ensemble cast and chemistry that made that movie (and subsequent sequels) so successful. Supergirls battle with the Brigands is just plain meh, and Lobo is not in the film enough. Fans delighted at the casting of Jason Mamoa as the perennial bad boy of the DC universe, and his part is so small, it feels like little more than a cameo.

            Worse yet, there was some really good material in this film to work with. I like the idea of Kara Zor-El suffering from a type of survivor’s guilt as she drowns in excessive partying and intergalactic alcohol; if there was an unconventional plot device to this version of the character, that was it, but it is too cluttered with other things to give it much airtime. This iteration of Supergirl is modern, spunky, and fun. Some time with her in outer space might have been funny, especially with the clever idea of red suns making Kryptonians more susceptible to alcohol, but making it by and large a sci-fi picture with flat, uninteresting villains and supporting characters along with a conflict that was lukewarm at best, probably didn’t do too much in the way of guaranteeing a Supergirl II.