Supergirl

Grade: D-

One of Supergirl’s first shots has the title character’s dog (Krypto) relieving himself on a front page newspaper article about Superman. It promises a fresh, vital, “girl power” look at a superhero, but it doesn’t even deliver on that. Supergirl is as pedestrian as they come – actually even more so. It makes this weekend’s other big release (Jackass: Best and Last) look like a masterpiece in comparison. It at least had heart and an infectious sense of authentic community.

Superhero plots tend to lose me more than most anything else. Supergirl’s storyline is an unusual “two birds, one stone” situation. A villain has shot Krypto with a poisonous dart that will kill him in 72 hours. This is the same guy who killed Ruthye’s parents. He’s bald, and looks like Hellraiser if you pushed the pins in his face all the way in, exposing only the heads. Ruthye and Supergirl team up for, respectively, revenge and the antidote for Krypto. Conveniently, Hellraiser Pinhead Guy just happens to carry the antidote everywhere he goes.

Director Craig Gillespie’s previous credits include two that I enjoyed enough: Dumb Money and I, Tonya. Here, he has created a boring inept mess. A flashback shows us Supergirl’s ailing parents. The extent of their radiation poisoning is they act like they have a stomach ache. The fight scenes manage to be incomprehensible for various reasons. Sometimes the camera lingers off to the side of the set, leaving us to maybe catch some action here and there in our peripheral. Other times, it’s dimly lit, or relies too heavily on claustrophobic closeups. At one point, HPG repeats himself with emphasis on a different word than the first time, like he’s doing a Meisner acting exercise. I can’t even tell if Milly Alcock, as the title character, has star power, because she isn’t given much to work with when it comes to…everything. 

She can recover from anything, no matter what, which takes away all the stakes. As for Krypto, what happens with him should be obvious. Do you really think a PG-13 rated DC Comics major motion picture would have any other outcome for the dog, besides the obvious one? And yet, the movie treats it like a big moment of suspense, as if the result could go either way. It doesn’t have the dramatic effect it seems to think it does. It’s one of many reasons Supergirl might leave you with a case of “radiation.”

Grade: D-