Now that the golden age of the blockbuster superhero-comic-book movie is supposedly—and thankfully—over, fans of last decade’s Marvel and D.C. pictures should be demanding more, not less. Will there be rioting in the streets once audiences get some idea of how lousy Supergirl is? Probably not. At the screening I attended, a trio of good-natured fanboy-slash-influencers sitting behind me—before the movie started, they’d been chattering loudly about comic-book-related entertainments they’d either recently seen or were excited about—chortled performatively at a few of the movie’s opening jokes. But as the film wore on—silence. Here was a movie they wanted to like, but there’s no way on Earth, or certainly on Krypton, that it could have met their expectations. Supergirl, a spinoff of 2025’s sub-mediocre Superman reboot, may have been conceived to rev us up. How long are we going to settle for movies that just wear us down?

It’s not the movie’s star, Milly Alcock, as Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El, A.K.A. Supergirl, who’s the problem. As the movie opens, Kara is having a boozy existential crisis. Her parents (played in flashback sequences by David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham, with more tenderness than this enterprise demands) are dead: as their home planet of Krypton was being destroyed, they’d decamped to a floating colony known as Argo City, hoping to raise little Kara in safety. But survival there was impossible; like her cousin Kal-El, or Superman, before her, Kara was placed in a pod and catapulted to Earth for her safety, along with her scampish dog, Krypto. But her adjustment to her new planet has been hard; the superpowers our yellow sun bestows upon her proved to be a burden. So she’s parked herself, her dog, and her ramshackle traveling trailer on the planet Holzherr where, because she has no superpowers, she's free to enjoy the effects of alcohol and party herself into a stupor. She’s drinking to forget. Soon, we’ll know exactly how she feels.

But Kara's party-time is interrupted by the arrival of a tough teenage girl who’s out for vengeance. Eve Ridley’s Ruthye has just seen her whole family brutally murdered at the hands of the villainous Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the leader of a group of violent space marauders known as the Brigands. She wants Kara’s help, but Supergirl has no interest in sisterly solidarity: she’s too busy camping out at the local watering hole with creatures who look like cheap knockoffs from the Star Wars cantina scene. Then Krem poisons Krypto, in an unpleasant and overly manipulative scene that’s too much even though we know we’re basically looking at a special-effects dog. (He's clearly supposed to be adorable, but he bears so little resemblance to any real dog you might know that he's effectively charmless.) As the creature lies, slowly dying, on the table of a local healer, Kara vows to find Krem, who wears a little vial around his neck holding the antidote to the poison. She has 72 hours to save Krypto. Though she’s still uninterested in helping Ruthye, the two stumble into what’s basically an interplanetary human-trafficking ring, and Kara is forced into action. See, sisterhood is powerful after all. And it makes a good hook from which to hang a fake-feminist movie.

Is the basic idea of sex slavery perhaps just a little too grim a plot point for a PG-13-rated fantasy? Maybe. But even if you can overlook that, Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie, has so little to offer. Kara’s adventures take her to several planets, each with a different colored sun. So why are all of them rendered in variations of murky brown? The action sequences are jerky and disjointed; Supergirl’s laser eyes constitute the only occasional, if inadequate, jolt of life. The gags are both belabored and feeble. Occasionally, Kara will utter some kind of pithy truism: “He sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth,” she observes solemnly, in reference to her goofy-gallant superhero cousin. But she clearly can’t see the truth of the dull, dismal movie around her.

David Corenswet makes an occasional appearance as Clark Kent/Superman himself, and in these brief moments, the film raises its weary head, if only for an instant. Alcock does have some feisty charm, but it takes an awfully long time for her to emerge in her spiffy red, blue, and gold Supergirl outfit. Kara spends most of the movie in a drab, dun-colored coat, her blond hair trailing around her shoulder in unwashed clumps; she’s like the final straggler at an outdoor festival, refusing to go home for a bath long after the last band has packed up its gear and split.

But other actors in Supergirl suffer an even worse fate. What’s a terrific actor like Schoenaerts doing in a piece of junk like this? As the baddie Krem, he’s almost unrecognizable: His sensitive, chiseled face is dotted with silvery piercings; his hairdo is basically a shaved head adorned with an anemic ponytail. The role requires basically one expression, a mechanized scowl. If you’ve seen Schoenaerts in movies like Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone or Laure de Clermont-Tonnere’s The Mustang, you’ll know he has so much more to offer. Every actor needs a paycheck. But it’s still dispiriting to think that a performer like Schoenaerts can’t be put to better use, even in a throwaway superhero movie. Welcome to the new Hollywood, or what passes for it. It’s the coldest planet of all.