Supergirl Review: Milly Alcock Deserved Better Than This Generic DC Mess

Milly Alcock gives Supergirl the attitude, anger and vulnerability she needs. Unfortunately, the generic cosmic adventure surrounding her never rises to the performance.

TLDR: This Supergirl 2026 review comes with one substantial compliment and a long list of frustrations. Milly Alcock is compelling as Kara Zor-El, bringing anger, loneliness and a volatile sense of humor to a hero who should feel radically different from Superman. The movie around her is a generic, dramatically thin cosmic adventure with a weak villain, muddled action and far too little conviction about what makes Kara special.

Supergirl is not an unqualified disaster. That would almost be less annoying. It contains the foundation of a much better film and keeps allowing brief glimpses of it before retreating into familiar blockbuster noise. Alcock deserves another opportunity to play Kara. Ana Nogueira’s screenplay and Craig Gillespie’s direction give us very little reason to revisit this particular adventure.

Supergirl 2026 review: Milly Alcock is not the problem

Directed by Gillespie and written by Nogueira, Supergirl sends Kara on an interstellar pursuit of vengeance and justice. DC has described the movie as inspired by Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, with Kara distinguished from her cousin by her direct memories of Krypton and its destruction. That is a terrific dramatic starting point. Clark Kent knows Krypton as an inheritance. Kara knows it as a home she lost.

Alcock understands the difference. Her Kara is not simply Superman with sharper dialogue and a worse mood. She carries herself like someone who has learned to turn pain into attitude because the alternative would be admitting how badly that pain still hurts. Alcock gives the character an abrasive surface without making her emotionally vacant. Even when the film pushes Kara toward glibness, the performance suggests frustration and isolation beneath it.

That is why blaming Alcock for the film’s failure would be absurd. She gives scenes more personality than the writing has earned, and her ability to move between defiance and vulnerability provides the movie with most of its emotional texture. She looks capable of carrying a stranger, harsher and more intimate Supergirl story. The film keeps interrupting that possibility to conduct ordinary superhero business.

Kara’s trauma becomes characterization in outline form

The screenplay knows the correct facts about Kara. She remembers Krypton. She is angry, reckless and lonely. Her grief makes justice difficult to separate from revenge. Yet knowing these ingredients is not the same as dramatizing them. Supergirl frequently treats Kara’s trauma as a collection of signals rather than the force determining how she relates to people and how she changes.

A strong version of this story would make every stage of the interstellar journey challenge Kara’s instincts. Her power should not automatically make her morally certain. Her anger should create costs beyond temporary friction, and her memories of Krypton should complicate rather than merely decorate the revenge narrative. Instead, the film gestures toward those tensions and then hurries back to plot movement, jokes or action.

The emotional beats consequently feel scheduled rather than accumulated. The movie wants grief to supply weight, irreverence to supply momentum and franchise spectacle to supply scale. Those elements can coexist, but they need a clear dramatic hierarchy. Here, a serious moment often arrives because the structure requires one, not because the preceding scenes have made it unavoidable.

That weakness is especially frustrating because Kara does not need to be made likable in the bland corporate sense. She can be difficult, impulsive and furious. Those qualities are potentially the entire point. The film’s responsibility is to explore them honestly, not sand them down with humor whenever the atmosphere risks becoming uncomfortable.

Krem is too generic for a story this personal

Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem of the Yellow Hills, the adversary at the center of Kara’s journey. The problem is not that Krem lacks threat on paper. It is that he remains dramatically inadequate for the story built around him. A revenge film needs an antagonist who applies moral pressure to the protagonist, exposes a contradiction or makes the pursuit feel corrosive. Krem too often functions as an objective with a pulse.

That makes the vengeance plot feel procedural. Kara has enormous powers and enormous pain, but the villain does not create a sufficiently complicated collision between them. The film can raise the physical stakes, yet its central conflict remains emotionally flat. Krem gives Kara someone to pursue when she needs someone—or something—that forces her to confront what vengeance is turning her into.

A thin villain also damages the supporting characters. Ruthye Marye Knoll, played by Eve Ridley, should help define the human and moral dimensions of the pursuit. Instead, the screenplay’s limited antagonist construction leaves everyone orbiting a conflict that never develops the necessary gravity.

A cosmic adventure that feels strangely small

Supergirl promises an interstellar odyssey, but changing planets does not automatically create wonder. Too much of the movie feels like conventional superhero plotting transferred to cosmic backdrops. New environments appear, trouble follows and action erupts, yet the journey rarely develops the sense of discovery, danger or escalating consequence that would make Kara’s corner of the DC universe feel distinctive.

The action is a particular disappointment. Kara’s abilities should allow for set pieces built around speed, distance, impact and the frightening imbalance between her and almost everyone she encounters. Instead, the visual presentation frequently muddies geography and weakens physical weight. Movement is plentiful; memorable spatial storytelling is not.

Good action reveals character through decisions made under pressure. Here, the set pieces too often pause Kara’s story rather than advancing it. The film becomes louder without becoming more intense. Its conflicts expand in visual activity but not in emotional consequence, leaving the climax with less force than its scale demands.

There is also an unmistakable familiarity to the movie’s mixture of cosmic grime, irreverent banter and eccentric supporting figures. None of those elements belongs exclusively to another franchise, and Supergirl does not need to approach outer space with solemnity. The problem is that the film uses recognizable cosmic-superhero ingredients without combining them into a personality of its own. It serves reheated attitude when Kara’s perspective should be the source of something much more specific.

The jokes keep letting the drama off the hook

Humor is not the enemy of trauma. A wounded character using jokes as armor can be revealing, and Alcock has the timing to make that approach work. Supergirl falters because its humor regularly acts as an escape hatch. Scenes approach grief, loneliness or moral discomfort, then retreat before those feelings can become complicated.

That produces tonal shifts rather than a genuinely layered tone. Darkness and comedy sit next to each other, but they do not consistently sharpen each other. The jokes sometimes make Kara entertaining in the immediate moment while preventing the film from confronting what her behavior means over the course of the story.

Gillespie has a lead who can sell acidic comedy and emotional volatility in the same scene. The movie should trust her with silence, discomfort and unresolved anger. Instead, it often behaves as if viewers will flee the instant a superhero film stops nudging them in the ribs.

Lobo feels like franchise machinery crashing the party

Jason Momoa’s Lobo is an attention-grabbing presence, but attention is not the same thing as necessity. The character’s inclusion feels less like an essential extension of Kara’s arc and more like the larger franchise briefly grabbing the steering wheel. Momoa supplies the expected energy, yet Lobo competes with a movie that has not finished establishing its protagonist.

The issue is structural, not a complaint about Momoa or Lobo as a character. A first solo film should build Kara’s emotional architecture: what she wants, what she fears, what separates her from Clark and what kind of hero she might become. A conspicuous supporting-player detour has to deepen that work. When it mainly adds noise and future-facing excitement, it becomes another reminder that cinematic universes are forever advertising the next attraction before the current one has justified the ticket.

The Associated Press review similarly praised Alcock while questioning the story’s originality and Lobo’s place in its tonal mixture. Variety’s review was harsher about the characterization and central motivations. Those assessments land on the movie’s basic problem: it has a vivid lead but no equally vivid idea of what to do with her.

The mixed reception is more generous than our verdict

Supergirl opened theatrically in the United States on June 26, 2026. As checked on September 14, Rotten Tomatoes listed a 53% critics score from 373 reviews and a 72% verified-audience score from more than 5,000 ratings. Metacritic listed 50 out of 100 from 56 critic reviews and categorized the response as mixed or average. Those dynamic figures describe a divided response, not universal rejection.

MovieBunker lands substantially below that middle ground. Alcock’s performance, the appealing conception of Kara and intermittent flashes of cosmic texture prevent the movie from being worthless. They do not make its villain more interesting, its action clearer or its emotional development more convincing. Potential is not the finished product, even when the potential is wearing a cape and doing most of the heavy lifting.

This is not a referendum on female superheroes

Supergirl does not fail because audiences cannot accept a woman leading a superhero film, because Kara is too angry or because the character needs to imitate Superman more closely. That framing would let the actual movie escape responsibility. Its problems are painfully ordinary: weak villain construction, inconsistent tone, underdeveloped character work, forgettable action and a screenplay that keeps abandoning its best ideas.

In fact, the movie would improve by pushing Kara further away from the reassuring Superman template. Let her be difficult. Let her memories of Krypton change how she sees Earth, justice and her cousin. Let her anger have consequences that cannot be erased by the next joke. The safer and more familiar Supergirl becomes, the less reason this film has to exist.

Verdict: save Kara, lose the movie

Milly Alcock deserves another chance as Supergirl. She finds enough pain, attitude and restless energy in Kara to prove that this interpretation can carry a great film. The next screenplay needs to build around those qualities rather than treating them as flavor sprinkled over routine cosmic plotting.

This Supergirl leaves us interested in seeing Alcock play Kara again, preferably in a story with a formidable antagonist, legible action and the courage to let grief remain uncomfortable. The character deserves another shot. This generic, messy and oddly small-feeling movie does not deserve much defending.