REVIEW: Supergirl

 

    Some will say, "We don't need another edgy superhero!" But that's not what makes the utter mediocrity of DC's new Supergirl so devastating. People were saying "We don't need another X superhero" since 2012, and the post-Infinity saga stupor we've slogged through was not triggered by piling one-too-many superheroes onto the camel's back.

    The Flash sucked because its perversion of the butterfly effect theory was convoluted and ham-fisted. Black Adam sucked because nobody on that film knew what a moral dilemma actually looks like. "Love and Thunder" sucked because, despite what everyone thought in 2017, Waititi's style only barely worked in "Ragnarok" and was not going to work in a script which feels like it was farted out half-past midnight.

    Supergirl had none of those issues. The real tragedy of Supergirl is that it so easily could have worked.

    Drifting around the universe has mostly worked for Superman's trauma-riddled cousin, Kara, but things change after a moment of altruism gets her on the radar of a crew of bounty-hunters, who almost absentmindedly poison-dart her dog. She starts out this quest specifically to find the antidote to heal her dog, the only thing in this universe she'd suit up to save. Helping this little girl who lost her entire family to this crew is just a means to an end--they both know it. But what's that saying about faking it 'til you make it? 

    And that's a perfectly fine starting point. There's no "who thought this was a good idea?" brand storypoints akin to "pasting CG fur onto naked human bodies" that somehow didn't strike Tom Hooper as a bad idea when he adapted Cats.

    

    But consuming Supergirl is kind of like trying to sew while riding a really old bus whose wheels just aren't on right. However important the task at hand is, you somehow get the idea that this is not how things are supposed to be. Turning points are not supposed to feel like something that snuck into the finished cut. You aren't supposed to approach to approach the final conflict wondering whether you missed something about why our heroine is so against this girl taking vengeance on this dude who is literally abducting girls to be sex slaves. 

    The players on this board are all entertaining enough. Mily Alcock offers a unique slice of toughness as Kara "Supergirl." Though she's constantly surrounded by people who are bigger than her, she somehow manages to stand toe-to-toe with any of them, and all without feeling any obligation to match them with a snarl of her own.

    Meanwhile, Eve Ridley should feel out of place here as Ruthye, but her moral compass provides a necessary counterweight to the anarchy that pervades the rest of the cast. I actually really like Schoenaerts' lizardy bounty hunter, Krem, but when I'd heard that Matthias Schoenaerts was going to be a superhero villain, I also thought he was going to be given something a little more meaty. Jason Momoa feels more at home here as this vampire biker pirate than he did as Aquaman. 

    

    We all breathed a sigh of relief, after all, when head of DC James Gunn gave the promise last year that he would not greenlight a movie for production until he was satisfied with the screenplay, which makes this film's stumbling all the more mysterious.

    That may still be his modus operandi. I'm obviously extrapolating here, but this does have the feel of a movie that feels like it was suffocated in the edit, not the writing. Pay-offs that feel like they were stripped of their setup. Characters react to situations like they're part of some inside joke that they don't feel like sharing with all those people out in the audience. 

    The film after all has a remarkably short runtime for a modern superhero flick, like someone at Warner Bros. thought it was important to squeeze this movie into under an hour and forty-five minutes. 

    Good golly, was it the same dude who strangled the Salem's Lot adaptation?

            --The Professor