Making Charles Portis’ classic Western revenge novel True Grit (1968) into an intergalactic Comic Book Movie necessarily means that we are viewing it through the prism of an adaptation of an adaptation. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021-2022) is an inversion of that classic story, wherein the main character of Supergirl fulfills the Rooster Cogburn part while a young girl whose father is murdered by bandits joins her as a motivating companion. The story of True Grit, one of the best American stories ever told, is structured in a particular way that leads to outcomes with gravity. It’s about the true cost of revenge and the weight of retributive justice, common enough themes for hero movies, especially from the DC comics catalogue (see: Batman). In the second stab at James Gunn’s new DC regime, though, the stakes feel lower, the outcomes muddled by changes to the prime text and the source comic, leading to the ever-common hero movie problem of dropping the reins in the third act.
The idea of heroism in True Grit is almost accidental. The final confrontation ends with a coincidental death. Taking revenge is not what determines the Grit of the characters. It’s the actions along the way. Following the act of revenge, then, is the sequence with the snakebite, where the old hardened cowboy serves as the healer, while the toughened young girl takes on hardness in trade for her innocence, thus coloring her future in dark gray ambiguity.
Problem with Supergirl is that it misunderstands what this ending means, and inverts the actions of an ending which is particular only because it’s already an inversion of how these stories always go. Which means that Supergirl’s changes ultimately reduce it back into a normative lane of storytelling, but one which ironically contradicts True Grit and apparently also the comic book series it’s based on.
Apart from not understanding the story it’s telling, Supergirl is basically good enough. There’s an internal rhythm and cadence to it. Supergirl moves in metered verse, through action and expository scenes that bounce and rhyme. It flows, mostly, until that last act when it doesn’t, and then you can’t get the flow back again.
Director Craig Gillespie likes telling stories about women antiheroes or keeps doing it anyway. I, Tonya (2017) has the same balletic rhythm. Cruella (2021) doesn’t but does have the same spunky burn-it-all-down antihero sensibility. If these movies present a triptych of haywired She Gets Revenge movies so be it. That’s a fine fixation to have.
Every movie like this is also packaged with the least interesting question in the world: What does its existence mean for building a universe? Supergirl arrives with the best answer of all: Not much. While the new film coincides with James Gunn’s DC-rebooting Superman film from last year and shares the same DNA as Gunn’s Gaurdians movies in particular (notably, there are some good needledrop moments, no longer channeling the ‘80s and ‘90s, the aughts are The New Nostalgia, baby), there are no end-credits, no forced setups for other movies, and the story is blessedly self-contained (good, because it’s not properly handled in a single film). This is good news for what Gunn is building, because the film still captures a signature verve and outsiderness that marks a direction for DC. We’ll just have to wait see whether the filmmaking division keeps itself in-tact with the impending buy-out of Warner Bros.
While there are already a couple True Grit movies, there is also another Supergirl movie, 1984’s Jeannot Szwarc film of the same name. That era of hero movies is so much fun in its own way because there is no standardization yet. Filmmakers just did whatever, whether it be true to the comic or not at all, and there’s a thrill in that. Helen Slater stars in the original movie, as a hilariously adult looking version of this young girl character, although that may be suitable, because so much of the movie is concerned with the power of consent over one’s own body, and understanding the maturation of self. Here in 2026, Milly Alcock, freshly plucked out of a Game of Thrones spin-off, plays the character super-young, and it works, even if she can’t sell the hard-scrabble Rooster Cogburn of it all. Milly Alcock is definitively not John Wayne or Jeff Bridges, but it’s hilarious that she has to play the same character type as them.
Supergirl still often works. The action has choreography — it’s something we have to determine in comic book movies, are these things actually designed? It has rhythm. A nice jubilance set against hard Western themes. But it doesn’t amount to a story that gets to finish on its own terms. With a little more confidence in a bolder ending, there’s for sure something here. Who the audience would be is up for debate but as an aside from Superman stories, Supergirl is mostly exactly what it needs to be.