Reign of the Supermen (2019)

[Silver Nemesis]

[The Laughing Fish]

I rewatched this recently.

I didn't like this much in my first watch, mainly because I thought the reveal of Darkseid being responsible for creating Doomsday to attack Metropolis and using Hank Henshaw as a pawn to conquer the world made Superman's two villains into puppets.

But after having an open mind, I gave it another watch and thought it was okay. Some of the quippy dialogue gets tedious, and I'm not a fan of Rainn Wilson's voice as Lex Luthor and much prefer James Marsters in Superman: Doomsday, but it's great to see Steel in action, Lois is just as much a fighter as she helps Superman regain his strength in the end by exposing him to the sun. Henshaw's unreasonable hatred of Superman ruining Darkseid's guaranteed raid on Metropolis was a nice little touch that inadvertently saved the day. Lex being the Machiavellian bastard he is made his own contribution to stop the threat when he brought the entire Justice League back after they were presumed dead, so two of Superman's greatest enemies contributed stopping a much greater threat, albeit to satisfy their own selfish means. So yeah, Reign is a better film than I initially gave it credit for.

With that said, Death of Superman is still the better film of the two, and the better adaptation of the comics than Superman: Doomsday was. While I don't think Superman: Doomsday is bad exactly, it does squeeze two stories into one film but making the story uneven and lacking character depth, where as DOS and Reign has better room to breathe. I gotta say though, I do prefer Lex as the cloning madman in Superman: Doomsday better than Reign though, as he clones Superman just to abuse him as his puppet because he was robbed of the opportunity to kill him by Doomsday. Lex was sinister in Reign, but his Doomsday counterpart controlling and abusing him is another level of pure depravity.