Review: A hot mess, 'Supergirl' has a rowdy spirit but a too-terrestrial plot

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Set us as preferred Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) can swill an entire sorority’s supply of booze.As a Kryptonian, her hangovers are instantly cured by a yellow sun.

And so director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” follows a trail of empty beer bottles to find Superman’s lonely younger cousin marking her birthday on a solo interstellar bender, pounding shots alongside her dog, Krypto.Unlike sweet-natured Kal-El (David Corenswet), a.k.a.Clark Kent, who escaped Krypton as a baby, this traumatized 20-something bore witness to their home planet’s long and painful extinction.

Playing grief like the sandblasted absence of emotion, Alcock’s Supergirl isn’t in the mood for Metropolis do-gooding.She prefers slumming it at extraterrestrial honky-tonks with suitors who look like armadillo-plated slugs.

She’s most visibly depressed when she tries to convince herself she’s having fun.Who doesn’t want to go on a “Star Wars” cantina crawl? The opening stretch of “Supergirl” is great — Alcock even passes out on a toilet with aplomb.Briefly we hope that Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira are shaking up the superhero format like a bottle of gas-station champagne.

I’d love to see Alcock’s heroine in a grotty, silly “Animal House”-style comedy, out-drinking a galaxy of alien squids.But the limits of Hollywood’s imagination squeeze Supergirl to stop partying and start doing some regular old rescuing.

Sigh.Someone’s gotta save franchise movies from themselves.As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful teenager in “True Grit.” Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family.

Unlike Supergirl, the child thinks it�...