Rarely have I felt more FOMO over a movie screening than summer 1984 in London. Walking home from Brixton tube station, I was practically steamrolled by a packed house spilling out from the Ritzy Cinema, after a now-legendary women-only screening of the recently released Supergirl. The crowd was in raucous high spirits, still hooting with laughter as they crossed the street to a women’s dance night at the fabulous queer club then called The Fridge. 

While the Jeannot Swarc superhero flick that introduced a disarming Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El had been critically dismissed and was on its way to becoming an unmitigated commercial disaster, for this audience — women-only of course being code for lesbian — it was a riot. It would go on to become a camp classic across the queer spectrum and beyond, for anyone with a taste for so-bad-they’re-good trashtaculars.

Although considered a lowlight in the Christopher Reeve-led Superman Donner-verse, for many of us, the 1984 Supergirl was perversely enjoyable. From the cheesy effects to the unhinged scenery-munching of Faye Dunaway as power-crazed witch Selena (just watch the original trailer) to the sublime Brenda Vaccaro as her assistant Bianca, taking long drags on her Virginia Slims while probably trying to suppress eye rolls. Not to mention smoking hot Hart Bochner as the himbo-in-distress.

I wish I could say I had even half as good a time at Craig Gillespie’s leaden attempt to resuscitate Superman’s cousin as a viable hero in her own interstellar ruckus. Sadly, that’s not the case, despite Milly Alcock’s hard-edged performance making her an appealingly punky protagonist. 

The best parts of the film, scripted with little distinction by Ana Nogueira, are the flashbacks to Kara’s final months on what’s left of her dying home planet Krypton, or more specifically, the floating colony Argo City, also headed for destruction. There’s an emotional pulse to these scenes, as the teenage Kara fights the decision of her parents (David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham) to send her to Earth, just as her uncle sent her cousin Kal-El (David Corenswet) a couple decades earlier.

Those flashbacks have the tragic grandeur of losses both personal and collective, making you wish the filmmakers had gone the full origin-story route. Alcock’s too-few scenes with Corenswet’s Clark Kent/Superman also suggest what might have been a more entertaining tack, establishing a big brother/little sister dynamic with fun, spiky potential. 

The marked difference between the cousins is that Kal-El has been raised since early childhood by loving adoptive American parents, whereas Kara has absorbed the doom of the only home she has ever known — and her parents along with it. As Kara points out, Clark sees the good in everyone, she sees the truth.

Disappointingly, all that is doled out in fragments while Gillespie barrels through a pedestrian mainframe narrative that’s basically True Grit meets John Wick meets Mad Max: Fury Road with the usual random assortment of needle drops.

Drawing primarily on the 2021 DC comic series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, it picks up on Kara some years after her first stint on Earth, where her powers are supercharged by the yellow sun. While the occasional video call from Superman urges her to return to Metropolis and help him fight crime, Kara is still busy nursing her sorrows. She numbs her pain by getting smashed at scuzzy watering holes and crowd-surfing at music gigs on the planet Holzherr — a nod to Brittany Holzherr, a DC senior editor on Woman of Tomorrow — whose red sun saps her powers, allowing her to feel the vulnerability (and inebriation) of an ordinary mortal with beachy blonde tousled hair.

One of the earliest signs that the new Supergirl will be an uninspired slog is the overload of blobby alien dirtbags, grotesque creatures that look like they were refused admission to the Mos Eisley Cantina in the original Star Wars movie. Design-wise, they are way more gross than creepy or menacing.

Also on Holzherr, humble homesteaders the Knoll family brace for the intrusion of Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts, with more facial piercings than Hellraiser’s Pinhead), leader of a band of interplanetary Brigands. Delilah Knoll (Emily Piggford) reasons that they will give Krem the coveted swords hand-forged in the workshop of her husband Elias (Ferdinand Kingsley) and he will leave. But Krem has other ideas, unleashing sudden violence as the Knolls’ 13-year-old daughter Ruthye (Eve Ridley) witnesses the savage murder of her parents and brother.

Armed with a prized family sword that Krem and his goons somehow missed, Ruthye starts going bar to bar seeking vengeance, intent on reinventing herself as a young warrior. She eyes Kara as a promising mentor, and while the sozzled Kryptonian refugee tries to brush her off, Ruthye wears her down. When Krem takes off in Kara’s spacecraft, a rusted hulk that’s like an interplanetary RV, and shoots her beloved dog Krypto with a lethal tranquilizer that will result in agonizing death in three days, Kara joins Ruthye on her revenge quest.

Kara’s reasons are not entirely altruistic, given that Krem carries the only known antidote to his poisoned dart, triggering a race against the clock to save the dog. Audiences might expect the twofold motives of Kara and Ruthye to give the narrative some propulsion, but it’s surprisingly sluggish as it moves from one grungy planet to another. 

The two women board a “wormhole bus” full of assorted freaks; they thwart a trio of all-female Sklarian space pirates and their robotic spider drones; and get sold out by Bomar (Kadiff Kirwan) and Mareck (Thalissa Teixeira), the seemingly kind couple running a ramen bar in the outlaw town of Evely on the ravaged planet Bilquis — those names are another DC in-joke, referencing Woman of Tomorrow illustrator Bilquis Evely.

Turns out Bomar and Mareck were driven by desperation, hoping to secure the return of their daughter Sarna (Asha Soetan), one of the “brides” kidnapped by the Brigands to propagate their all-male race of thugs. But if this promises something along the lines of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa liberating the abducted breeders of Immortan Joe in Fury Road, it fails to deliver — either in thrills or in the feminist subtext of women in gauzy outfits reclaiming dominion over their bodies.

While the actors and their stunt doubles display impressive moves, and Claudia Sarne’s industrial electronica score keeps the action churning, the many clashes are mostly generic, seldom packing much of a visceral wallop, and the effects work is strictly standard-issue.

The closest the visually drab movie comes to excitement is the introduction of an amusing if underused Jason Momoa as Lobo, an immortal bounty hunter who looks like a heavy-metal god (or maybe a lost member of Kiss), chomping on a fat cigar and roaring around on his flying motorcycle. “I kill for money, not sport,” he tells Ruthye when she tries to enlist his help. But we know how those things go.

By contrast, Schoenaerts’ Krem is a look in search of a character, physically striking with his studded face and long mohawk braid but never given enough complexity to be interesting.

Last year’s Superman was divisive among the hardcore fandom but grossed a very respectable $619 million worldwide, kicking off the new era of DC Studios under co-chairs James Gunn and Peter Safran on a promising note. The movie had an irreverent spark that felt refreshing, fueling its buoyancy and pumping blood to its ample heart. 

Alcock’s scrappy characterization, tempering Kara’s jaded toughness and chaotic messiness with an increasingly strong sense of justice, would seem an ideal fit to continue in a similar vein. But Supergirl only intermittently comes to life when it revisits her painful past. Given Australian director Gillespie’s history with films about spirited, rule-breaking women, like I, Tonya and Cruella, the failure to find emotional depth in the sisterhood of Kara and Ruthye is notable.

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but I thought Sasha Calle’s Supergirl in 2023’s The Flash registered with more dimensionality, despite that movie overloading on self-referential DC fan service.

The suspicion arises that the new film has been chopped up in the editing room, removing some of the connective tissue. It’s telling that while Krypto jumped all over Superman, covering him with slobbery kisses in last year’s entry, this one concludes in Clark’s Metropolis apartment, where the dog enters with a flying leap and then more or less vanishes from the scene without even going near Clark.

The vast Hollywood expansion of global comic-book popularity in the four decades since Slater’s sweet and innocent Supergirl took flight means the new film will easily outperform its predecessor, which topped out at a dismal $14.3 million. But anyone invested in the DCU would be best to hold out for Gunn’s return to the director’s chair on next year’s Superman continuation, Man of Tomorrow.