- Location: Plane from Hawaii to SFO
- Witness the Death of Superman! That's the sort of hook that sells comic books (and comic book adaptations), but perhaps it is a premise destined to disappoint. For one thing, Superman ought to be damned difficult to kill. After all, Lex Luthor has been trying for 70 years without much to show for it. A more serious problem, however, is that there's no way that he'll really be dead. I mean, c'mon, this is Superman we're talking about here! You can kill off villains and sidekicks left and right and even sacrifice the occasional hero, but you cannot kill the Man of Steel. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Superman: Doomsday.
- The instrument of Superman's purported destruction is one of the comic book world's most famous deus ex machinas, a spiky, taciturn creature named Doomsday. As far as we know, this escaped alien convict exists only to kill and, from a writer's perspective specifically, to kill Superman (Adam Baldwin). The first half of the film involves some dull character bits that even Perry White (Ray Wise) wouldn't print (newsflash: Lex Luthor hates Superman; Lois Lane and Superman are in love) before launching into an extended fight scene between Doomsday and the Man of Steel. When the dust finally settles, the two combatants appear to be dead, and Metropolis reluctantly holds a funeral for its favorite citizen.
- But then a hand erupts up out of Superman's grave. Zombies, you ask? No, it's a clone planted by the dastardly Lex Luthor (James Marsters). Why would Luthor create a clone of his arch-enemy? Who cares? The point is that Luthor has groomed a Superman who, presumably as the result of Luthor's bizarre abuses, has a particularly twisted sense of justice. His first act is to kill an extremely disappointing version of Toyman (John DiMaggio), alerting Lois (Anne Heche) and Jimmy Olsen (Adam Wylie) that this is not the real deal Man of Steel. Fortunately, the real Superman is alive (of course!), mulleted, and ready to defeat his doppelganger. But first an extended training sequence?
- While the action scenes in Superman: Doomsday are decent enough, the movie is never especially engaging. Its attempts at gravitas, mostly in the form of interactions between Lois and Martha Kent (Swoosie Kurtz) ring hollow, and some of the minor plot points (Luthor's abusiveness and Jimmy's new career) are strangely off-putting. Surprisingly, the voice work in this film also falls precipitously short of the usual high quality associated with the Warner Brothers Animation Studio. The result is an eminently forgettable version of a story that, quite frankly, I never believed in the first place.
- Apparently, Superman has a trophy of Braniac's skull in the Fortress of Solitude, along with one of the mechanical monsters from the Fleischer cartoons.
- Kevin Smith had a cameo in this film. Not as cool as Paul Dini cameos in Kevin Smith films.
