At the forty-minute mark in Craig Gillespie's Supergirl, there's a scene wherein Milly Alcock, hungover and almost feral, gazes directly at the barrel of her own grief in a way that is so exacting it makes you wish the rest of the film could take such faith in her as she does in herself. It can't. And there you have the essence of what ails this second film in James Gunn's rebooted DC Universe: a fantastically talented leading actress trapped in a movie unable to make up its mind whether it wants to be a cosmic road trip, a revenge western, or a superhero origin story.
The premise works well enough. Kara Zor-El, still reeling from her destroyed planet and drowning her sorrow in an endless bar-crawl across the galaxy, ends up on the trail of Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a teenager who witnessed her family's massacre by Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). The addition of a paralyzed super-dog brings it all together, giving it the framework of something that could have been Logan with a cape gritty, sad, and morally ambivalent. But that isn't what Gillespie gives us. Instead, he gives us an awkward mashup: a Krypton flashback here, a Momoa cameo there, and a cue from the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack timed just to remind you that the studio behind this also does that. It's like a checklist all style and no substance, and that's the only thing the movie ever seems to be able to get right.
And then there's Alcock, the movie's savior literally, since her name is a play on that word. In her hands, Kara becomes an emotionally broken woman pretending to be impervious to pain because the alternative is breaking down in the open. It's a tightly-wound portrayal from a young actress who deserves better than this mess of a screenplay. The script, written by Ana Nogueira, hints at big themes vengeance as poison, sorrow as inheritance – and yet fails to commit to any of them to a logical conclusion. Scene resolution happens simply to keep the plot moving forward and not because the character has been driven to it.
Production-wise, the film is well-made but bland; director of photography Rob Hardy does some excellent work with the landscape vistas of the planet, while the action choreography, which should be a highlight in a story about a pursuit, is surprisingly flat. Matthias Schoenaerts as the evil villain is all bluster and no threat, a dangerous problem when the entire second half of the movie depends on the viewer wanting to watch him squirm.
There is a film here one about a woman using violence to escape from her grief, but slowly discovering that she can't. Rarely seen in the movie is the glimpsed vision of it, thanks to the occasional quiet scenes by Alcock. But Supergirl thinks that incident equals momentum, that volume equals emotion, and that it will carry the day. Unfortunately, it doesn't fly that well.