Supergirl review: 'runs out of juice'

Supergirl (12A) ★★

​Having been introduced as Clark Kent’s hard-partying off-world cousin in last year’s entertaining Superman reboot, hopes were high that Supergirl might offer a fresh take on such a dude-centric genre. Sadly, despite a spirited lead performance from Milly Alcock, this solo movie is weirdly lacklustre, as if the film itself has been interrupted mid-charge, unable to get to full power the way its damaged heroine does when exposed to the rays of a yellow sun.

The regenerative effects of the sun’s rays, part of the Supergirl/Superman mythos, actually becomes a potent visual metaphor for the film’s own failings. During the first big set-piece, director Craig Gillespie (who made I, Tonya and Cruella) drags out his almost-defeated heroine’s solar revival to such an extent that when she eventually springs back to life it feels pretty underwhelming, partly because the scene in question has her battling some not-especially-threatening tech pirates who’ve randomly hijacked the intergalactic bus she’s been forced to ride after the film’s actual villain, Krem (a stud-faced dullard played by Matthias Shoenaerts), steals her spaceship and poisons her dog Krytpo.

The chance to secure the antidote for Krytpo provides the initial motivation Supergirl needs to go after Krem, though even this doesn’t feel as urgent as it should. Instead it’s a spurious way of forcing the character to team-up with a 13-year-old orphan called Ruthye (Eva Ridley) who wants Supergirl to help her exact revenge on Krem, who’s slaughtered her family for reasons the film seems largely uninterested in exploring.

And so, instead of a lively, quippy comic-book adventure with a grungy heroine and her adorable superpowered canine sidekick (Krypto, a major scene-stealer in Superman, is kept off screen for most of the movie), we’re treated to lots of sombre yet shallow discussions about the nature of revenge and – despite some location work in the Highlands and Iceland – lots of murky set-pieces with characters that look like Mad Max cosplayers.

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That’s too bad because when the film weaves in Supergirl’s own backstory and her relationship with Superman (once again played by David Corenswet) there are flashes of the more interesting film promised by its presentation of Supergirl as a gender-flipped, Gen-Z riff on the sort of dive-bar-dwelling reluctant heroes we’ve seen countless times in detective movies, Westerns, action films and samurai flicks. But it’s all a bit tokenistic and the film never feels fully in tune with the character’s appeal or her hinted-at complexities, running out of juice long before its perfunctory, action-heavy ending.

In cinemas from 26 June

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