Even the left-wing Hollywood press is turning against Warner Bros’ new summer superhero tent pole, Supergirl, calling the film “super-horrendous” with the “worst script” ever.
The review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was quite negative ahead of the film’s worldwide debut coming up on Friday. The Hollywood newser ripped the film as “pretentious” for it’s “punk rock attitude” that is “cringe.”
Gleiberman dismissed the film, writing, “here’s the key thing to know about Supergirl, the second outing from James Gunn’s DC Studios: The entire movie thinks it’s ‘punk rock.'” And that, Gleiberman says, is “cringe.”
“The film introduces us to Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), who rather than being the spunky Supergirl of legend, saving earthly lives in a primary-colored spandex suit, is an interplanetary drunk in a Blondie T-shirt (how punk rock!), bopping from one arid dystopia to the next,” Gleiberman explained.
Gleiberman added that the main baddie of the film, “Krem of the Yellow Hills” (Matthias Schoenaerts), is a “an overly derivative Mad Max reject.”
“We’re told that Krem, a human trafficker who leads a group of space pirates known as the Brigands, possesses the strength of 10,000 men. But we’d be happier if he had the magnetism of one interesting one,” Gleiberman wrote.
As to Supergirl herself, Gleiberman says, “the character as written is so one-note that it’s hard to have much investment in what she’s up to.”
Then he turned his attention to the script, and insisted that ” the movie has no story! ” He then went on to deliver a spoiler-heavy description of the underlying motivations of the characters, none of which is deep, all that logical, or interesting. (I won’t reveal the plot here).
“Those are the motivations driving the entire not-even-interesting-enough-to-be-convoluted plot of Supergirl. Maybe that’s why the movie is full of action yet numbingly flat,” he concluded.
Gleiberman then ripped DC Studios guiding hand James Gunn for his pretensions of having the perfect script for Supergirl, yet still giving the world this film.
James Gunn, along with Peter Safran, knew that he was launching DC Studios right into the teeth of superhero fatigue. Gunn got asked a lot about how he was going to avoid that, and the key thing he said was: We’re not going into production on any movie until the script we have is rock-solid. For that was the overriding problem with the superhero overkill era: The films had lousy scripts, which were used as grids on which to layer the visual effects. Gunn was right to want to take the comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember.
The reviewer also slammed the CGI-dominated aliens in the film as making one “feel trapped in a Muppet movie.”
Supergirl, he says warming to his conclusion, “plods along, poised between sodden spectacle and snark.”
He ends ripping the film’s director, Craig Gillespie, “who made the arresting I, Tonya and the fabulous Cruella,” he writes. But adds, “I was shocked to see that [Gillespie]… could churn out a piece of product this generic in its action and its attitudinizing. What happened to his barbed humanistic wit? Maybe Gillespie, who’s Australian, convinced himself that the Mad Max Lite trappings of “Supergirl” make it a subversion of the genre.”
“It’s all so desperate to be ‘punk rock.’ But Supergirl is a punk crock,” Gleiberman bitingly concluded.
The film is taking major hits already, and it hasn’t even opened. The latest financial outlook seems to show that it will be a box office disaster, Fox News reported, and that it will only make an anemic $39 million or so on its opening weekend. Out of its $250 million budget, that is not good at all.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: Facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston, or at X/Twitter @WTHuston
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.