Anyway, there is no running brawl across half the country here – Doomsday just heads straight for Metropolis. There are some elements of the big showdown that are reminiscent of the comics version, and a few definite visual homages. The two duke it out while buildings collapse. It’s entertaining, but this fight really isn’t anything more brutal than the super-brawls from the various DCAU series. Once you’ve seen one bunch of superbeings wreck a city, you’ve seen them all.
Once the fight is over, Doomsday is dead rather unimpressively), and Superman staggers out of a cloud of dust. Superman croaks 27 minutes into the picture. Sorry for the spoiler.
One of the homages to the comics version is Ma Kent, back in Kansas, watching the fight on national TV. However, she’s got a sort of lobotomized look on her face, like she’s senile or maybe just on some really good drugs. My question is, where the fuck is Pa Kent while his son’s being killed on national TV? Seriously, he doesn’t even show up in the movie. Did Martha divorce him?
After Big Blue bites the big one, the funeral doesn’t last very long. Here’s where I’m going to come right out and say, “This is not as good as the comics or the main animated universe.â€? There is no procession of ten thousand superheroes wearing black armbands. There’s just a short speech by the mayor and a quick shot of Lois and Jimmy putting roses on Superman’s casket. This sucks. A big point of the comic series and of killing off Superman was to show what the world would be like without him. This doesn’t do well driving that point home, except for a few shots of small-time looting. Apparently the Metropolis police are used to sitting around on their butts all day eating doughnuts while Superman goes out and arrests people robbing the local 7-11.
Once the short funeral is over, Lois, who had already figured out Clark’s secret identity, goes to check up on his mother. Lois’s melodramatic speech to Ma Kent (in the doorway of her house, nonetheless) might have worked in comics, but not on screen. That’s one consistent flaw through the movie – cheesy, melodramatic speeches. Granted, superhero comics (especially those starring the man with the big “Sâ€? on his chest) are basically just soap operas for guys.
They’re all about overbuff steroid cases in tight, brightly-colored underwear slugging the crap out of each other while spouting cheesy lines about justice versus evil. However, what works on a printed page is very different than what works on the screen. Most of the time, the very same people who made this movie know enough to avoid this kind of awful dialog. This time, though, they failed to recognize the cheese for what it was.
Cut back to Metropolis, where Lex schemes some more, lamenting that he didn’t get to kill Superman (taking time out to shoot Mercy because he’s really fucking evil…or maybe it’s to make sure she doesn’t squeal about him being the one whose minions dug up Doomsday), and ends up cloning Superman. Yeah. Just like that.
Meanwhile, Toyman is on the loose. For this, Toyman got redesigned as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, but with a little less gut and the ever-popular goth black t-shirt. John DiMaggio’s voice fits the redesign, but I think the “creepy guy pretending to be a little kidâ€? interpretation from the main DCAU is better than “30 year old action figure collector still living in his parents’ basementâ€?. Guess who shows up to stop him?
Yeah. The fake Superman. While we’re talking about this boob, the Superman clone is kind of like a hybrid of the Eradicator (in that he’s brutal), the Cyborg Superman (in that he’s the real one’s nemesis), and Superboy (in that he’s a clone), which gives us three of the four fake Supermen in one. If they gave him a bigass hammer, we’d have the whole set. There’s also some bits of the Justice Lord Superman from the “A Better Worldâ€? episodes of Justice League thrown in to boot. “Dark Superman”, as he’s called in the subtitles, is a boring villain, mainly because it’s all been done before. Even a competent Superman clone hell-bent on brutally protecting Metropolis by dropping Toyman onto the street from several stories up (another “matureâ€? addition) isn’t anything all that novel.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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