The latest in DC's line of direct-to-video animated features, "All-Star Superman" is a nice effort to present a different take on the Man of Steel, but it falls short.
Based on the Grant Morrison comics run, "All-Star Superman" deals with Superman's death yet again, this time at the convoluted hands of Lex Luthor (voiced by Anthony LaPaglia). Turns out Luthor sabotages the first-ever space mission to the sun. When Superman (voice of James Denton) comes to the rescue, he is poisoned by overexposure to the sun's rays when he extends around the crippled spacecraft the bio-electrical field that protects him.
Now slowly dying, Superman is free to do the things he's long denied himself, namely sparking a real romance with Lois Lane (voice of Christina Hendricks).
Meanwhile, Luthor, thought to have reformed and been helping the government on the sun mission, is arrested, convicted and scheduled for execution but still is able to plot against Superman from behind bars. This film offers perhaps the best look at the rivalry between the two, Luthor's motives for trying to kill him and his singular, final obsession for beating Superman.
But the film is also laid out in a clipped, scattershot way with odd transitions and plot developments. At one point, in the space of a few minutes, Lois goes from her usual in-love-with-Superman mindset to convincing herself that he is dangerous and plotting — then actually trying to carry out — a plan to kill him, only to return to normal immediately afterward. (There is an explanation I'm not going to go into, but it's suddenly nonsensical to a pointless degree.)
There are other characters, both heroes and villains, who show up, figure into a few scenes and then disappear for the rest of the film. Lois Lane briefly gets Superman's powers through some mystery serum that somehow a villain manages to get a hold of, and the film's climax, for building to Superman's death, is oddly anticlimactic.
This adaptation is at its best while showing the minutia of Superman's life. We learn a great deal about the Fortress of Solitude — that he has robots there helping him, that the key to get into the fortress weighs 200 million pounds and that he has a variety of weapons and creatures living there (we have learned some of this from previous incarnations, of course).
The animation and art is similar to previous films, but pulls in some of the visual style of the Morrison books, specifically with Superman's look. His cape is much more bunched around the collar of his costume and is shorter; it hardly even reaches his upper thighs, making it look more like Captain Marvel's cape than his own, which typically hits mid-calf on Superman.
DC's adaptations of some of its more critically acclaimed comic stories have been hit-or-miss, as have most of its other entries. "Justice League: New Frontier" was strong, as was "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" (save for a silly ending), but others like "Superman: Doomsday" and this one have been less so. It is fun to see DC branching out with these, but the consequence in not connecting the films is that they feel artificial and not set in a single world. With no consequences from one movie to the next, it's easy to pull out a bunch of gimmicky ideas, as this film does. It feels less like its own film and more like a scatterbrained, truncated version of the comic series.
The Blu-ray extras follow the progression of previous films, with some features on Superman, on this particular series, a look at the next film, "Green Lantern: Emerald Knights," and, oddly, a look at the previous DC Universe film, "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse."
Film: 3 Yaps Extras: 3.5 Yaps