Last summer’s reboot of “Superman” was a movie that provoked reactions all over the map. Some liked it, some didn’t, but even if (like me) you were in the positive camp, the movie was trying to be so many things at once that your appreciation for how close it came to echoing the vibe and style of comic books might have scraped up against your feeling that it was all a bit…busy. That said, there was one thing about “Superman” that perhaps the whole world could agree on: In that 12-minute-long argument between Clark Kent and Lois Lane (mostly a very good scene), the moment when Clark made the case that Superman’s wholesome valor was “punk rock”… well, that was cringe. The second you call anything “punk rock,” it has ceased, in that moment, to be “punk rock.” (It has instead become lame.) And Superman calling what he does “punk rock” is super-cringe.
In that light, 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.” It opens with Krypto the superdog peeing on a newspaper headline about Superman saving a small town. From there, 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, seeking out junk-heap bars on junk-heap planets, getting into fights set to razory anthems by Wet Leg and Halsey. The villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, is an overly derivative “Mad Max” reject, played by the Belgian actor Matthias Schoentaerts with a shaved head and scraggly ponytail and rows of silver pellets piercing his face and an accent that might be from Transylvania — think the Lord Humungus meets Pinhead meets Adam Sandler. 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.
