The hardest lesson you learn as a critic, and the one you must keep learning over and over until the day you die, whether in body or in spirit, is that you have to meet whatever work you have set your gaze upon where it’s at. I had a whole draft ready to go, in which I wrote about Supergirl, being the second film of James Gunn and Peter Safran’s DC Studios, in the overly formal language used in the narration of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the comic it is supposedly retelling. It was a fun literary gimmick, a contrived metaphor in which I was the hero, and it made for one hell of a statement piece. The letter you are reading now is not that, for a very simple reason: I can’t give you my truthful thoughts about this film if I make it seem like I had any fun watching it. It’s lousy, and it didn’t have to be, and now I have to join the miserable chorus of the bitterly disappointed.

The worst part, if indeed a single worst part can be identified, is that the task ahead of director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira was incredibly easy. The award-nominated miniseries by Bilquis Evely, Tom King and Mattheus Lopes, being an eight-part love letter to Supergirl and her Silver Age sci-fi roots, had already figured out the populist angle on the characters and how they were supposed to fit in the grand tapestry of their comic book universe. The homework was there for them to copy, and all they had to do was to cut a couple of digressions, account for the lack of existing continuity, and give room for its more than able cast (Milly Alcock, hitting every iconic note of the part despite the screenplay’s insistence on having her be a party girl) to make it their own.

Instead, what they did was remove the charm, the character and the subtext such that nothing would remain but the bare bones of the story. It begins with a fundamental misreading of genre: despite its pulp fantasy trappings, Woman of Tomorrow is a Western through and through, exploring its frontier one stunningly realized place at a time, and observing its characters reacting and changing until the fateful duel at high noon. Meanwhile, the film takes the shape of a classic American road trip, moving the protagonists from roadside attraction to roadside attraction and having them do their bit (the film has TWO bar brawls) until the editor has over one hundred minutes of usable footage.

Yes, the action is utterly competent, choreographed into lively if a bit unimaginative scenes, all set to one needle drop or another, or sometimes a shockingly awful cover of a middling 2000s pop punk hit. It doesn’t make up for the fact that character development happens by fait accompli, as if being on the brink of death inside of a cave would suddenly make you ready to embrace your destiny as a hero or appreciate your living relatives on another planet, or as if being near a couple of fights suddenly made you able to pull what can only be described as Batman: Arkham Asylum type moves. Yes, the production design, whenever the light decides to highlight it, bolsters an impressive array of rubber beasties, which make up for their lacking charms with sheer numbers. Lobo is in there, and while Jason Momoa only hints at the joyful mania that makes the character tick, he’s a highlight.

At the end of the day, they gave the director of I, Tonya and Cruella the task of making a Supergirl movie, and that was the biggest mistake of them all. Safran and Gunn picked a director whose modus operandi is looking at the context around a familiar story to find the angle through which the characters reclaim their narrative, and gave him a comic with nothing but unfamiliar things. The result is predictable: the strange and the unusual gets flattened into recognisable shapes, which is how Krem of the Yellow Hills gets turned into dollar store Immortan Joe. (It doesn’t help that Matthias Schoenaerts delivers one of the worst performances committed to a cape film in decades, as if he had been given no other instruction besides that he’s a weird pervert) On occasion, when the film actually does revisit an old story under a new light, you can see the approach work: the slow death of Argo City, even amputated of its most ludicrously dramatic moments, has four minutes of nothing but emotion and alien language that did break my heart.

As I said: this film had every opportunity to be good. It wasn’t, and the ways in which it wasn’t betray the assembly line logic of studio filmmaking. Sure, it’s worse than the comic. But it’s also worse than several movies. TWO STARS OUT OF FIVE.

HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS WILL RETURN