Who is Supergirl outside of Superman? It’s a question that’s plagued the character ever since her creation in 1959, when she was introduced as, essentially, a blonde, female version of Superman. Her powers, her costume, her backstory, and even her personality were all intrinsically linked to her Kryptonian cousin. While that’s changed in the comics over the years, movies and TV — with a few exceptions — have struggled to pull Supergirl out of Superman’s shadow.But, intriguingly, a short cameo by Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor-El at the end of 2025’s Superman teased a fresh take on the Girl of Steel. This Supergirl was a rough-and-tumble misfit who scoffed at Superman’s corn-fed optimism and rejected his brand of relentless kindness in favor of partying it up on alien planets. (She also was the proud owner of a very unruly, but cute, dog.) And it’s this Supergirl that becomes the unexpected antiheroine in Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, a gritty space western that simultaneously feels like a novel take for the long-underserved superhero… and a well-worn retread of the cosmic superhero adventure that hasn’t felt fresh since the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It’s almost a shame — Supergirl, with its perfectly cast lead and its space-western stylings, has all the ingredients to be amazing. But instead of soaring, it just falls short.Milly Alcock’s brusque performance as Kara is the movie’s greatest asset. | Warner Bros.Written by Ana Nogueira in her first feature script, Supergirl relies heavily on the strengths of the comic book arc it adapts, Tom King’s “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.” Published in 2021, it was conceived as a superhero riff on True Grit, with Supergirl as the unlikely mentor to a young girl on a revenge quest. And Supergirl takes this concept and runs with it: Alcock’s Kara Zor-El is as disgruntled and jaded as the most grizzled western antihero, and at first, refuses to help young Ruthye (a noble but somewhat one-note Eve Ridley) avenge her family’s murders at the hands of the ruthless Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts, doing his best Mad Max villain), the leader of a group of intergalactic space pirates and traffickers called The Brigands. But when Krem shoots Kara’s dog with a poisoned dart and steals her spaceship, a devastated Kara is forced to team up with Ruthye to hunt Krem across the galaxy and save her dog.On paper, the story is strong and exactly what Supergirl needs to finally step out of Superman’s shadow. This Kara was a teenager when she witnessed the slow demise of Argo City, the final remnant of Krypton, saved by her scientist father’s ingenious force field. She arrived on Earth a stranger to its people, and to her own burgeoning powers. She’s adrift and alone in the universe, except for Krypto. Of course, she’s selfish and angry, and more than a little rude. And of course, it takes an equally bull-headed young girl, driven by revenge, to finally break down her walls and move her to compassion. It’s a familiar story, but given a slight edge of novelty because our antihero is a woman — and one that is mostly associated in pop culture with being a shining beacon of hope. And while it’s not reinventing the wheel, it is refreshing to see such a storied female character written like a man.Don’t shoot Supergirl’s dog or steal her spaceship. | Warner Bros.Supergirl’s greatest asset is Alcock, who brings a great punk-rock flavor to the Girl of Steel; she’s the riot grrrl answer to David Corenswet’s pop-loving Superman (a distinction that the movie hammers in a bit too hard with its alt-rock and Blondie-filled soundtrack). Alcock barges into every scene with a smirk on her face and a right hook ready to be unleashed, and it’s a joy to watch her barrel her way through every scene like a righteous, quippy tsunami. She’s got a cheeky, punky ferocity that feels like the perfect foil to Corenswet’s Superman. The only issue is that the rest of the movie struggles to live up to her performance.Perhaps the most glaring problem is how the film looks. The film’s biggest strength — the story based on “Woman of Tomorrow” — also becomes something of an albatross for Supergirl, as any comparisons will inevitably bring to mind the jaw-droppingly beautiful art by Bilquis Evely and Mat Lopes, which gave Supergirl’s story an otherworldly, fantastical sheen. Gillespie’s Supergirl goes in the opposite direction, towards gritty, industrial cyberpunk. It makes some kind of sense for the story — Supergirl has Kara and Ruthye navigating seedy underworlds and back alleys full of ruthless bounty hunters (including Jason Momoa’s wildly fun Lobo), but there’s something lost in ignoring the cosmic otherworldliness of the comic altogether. And it doesn’t help that the movie’s attempts at mimicking the aesthetics of better industrial sci-fi movies — and, for some reason, Mad Max: Fury Road — results in Supergirl looking like a generic hodgepodge of beige sci-fi landscapes.The mentor-mentee relationship between Kara and Ruthye is the driving force of the movie. | Warner Bros.Supergirl is at its strongest when it brings us back to the austere final days of Argo City, as Kara mourns her mother dying of radiation poisoning and then, the rest of her people, as her father Zor-El (an always wonderful David Krumholtz) sends her to join her cousin on Earth. This is when it feels like the movie taps into the true depths of Kara’s despair and loneliness, which the rest of the movie, in its eagerness to follow the trappings of the revenge western, only vaguely alludes to. Instead, the movie prefers to use some narrative shortcuts to spell out those emotional arcs — Kara’s desperation to save her dog, for one, and her refusal to let Ruthye take vengeance, for another.For some reason, Gillespie has been upheld as the male director who gets flawed women. And while he’s succeeded with I, Tonya and, to a lesser extent, Cruella, his grasp of the complexities of Kara feels competent at best. So is his grasp of the film’s ambitious attempt to thoughtfully navigate themes of gendered brutality through a (somewhat misguided) human trafficking plotline. And that may be the best thing that can be said about Supergirl: it’s competent. It fits together, like cogs in a clock, or like a machine-cut jigsaw puzzle. But for a hero like Supergirl, who has been underserved all her existence, maybe competent isn’t enough.Supergirl flies into theaters June 26.