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It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting a superhero movie. Marvel Studios has been dominating the scene since 2008. Fox is struggling to compete with the X-Men franchise and maybe utilizing the Fantastic Four as well, all in an effort to keep Disney’s hands off of them. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. has been putting DC Entertainment to work, releasing three commercially successful and critically trashed films to set up their own universe. Now, though, Mattel toys is getting in on the action with their very own superhero: Max Steel. Toy-based properties have worked before, but does Max Steel live up to the expectations we set on superhero movies nowadays? Let’s find out.
Max Steel tells the story of Max McGrath (Ben Winchell), a troubled teenager who is moved back to the town where his father (Mike Doyle) died just as another year of high school is about to begin. After an awkward first day, he discovers that he has developed strange powers, and after stumbling across an alien robot named Steel (the voice of Josh Brener), he… You know what? I can’t. This movie is just too dumb for me to even finish this synopsis. You really want to know what this dumbass plot is? Check Wikipedia, because I honestly don’t even want to give this movie any credit by taking it seriously for one moment. This movie sucks, y’all. Honestly, this is the laziest superhero movie I’ve seen in years, and I saw Thor: The Dark World.
Before I really tell you my problems with the movie, I want to list the few positives here. I actually thought there were some interesting ideas thrown around in terms of the powers (which are based on tachyons, the go-to Star Trek gobbledy-gook) and the situations. There is one sequence where Max is chased by a giant tornado creature that I thought was genuinely really cool for the most part. I also kind of enjoyed the last battle, as trite and same-y as it was. Okay, I think I’ve said enough nice things.
Look, I don’t like being the guy to rag on movies that badly, so I’ll just go down the list of the three biggest things that are wrong with this movie. The first is the writing, which is so lazy and uninspired that you would think someone just filled in some MadLibs and didn’t bother making a real story. There are scenes where characters give an insane amount of exposition in a little under a few minutes and expect you to keep up, even though most of this exposition is never touched on again. The big “evil threat” that Max is supposed to destroy shows up once in the film, the villain’s motivation is never really discussed or explained in a satisfying way, and Max’s powers themselves are very vaguely defined and don’t even follow the same rules that the film sets up, a huge failure for a superhero movie. You know, the ones that are about a person with incredible powers they and the audience don't understand? For example, Steel tells Max that whenever he gets worked up he generates tachyon energy that will ultimately kill him if not siphoned off. Cut to a half hour later where Max is running his ass off through the woods for an insanely long distance and shows not one iota of tachyon energy! Max himself shows no real concern when he starts developing powers, and everyone around him just take his weirdness and Steel’s antics in stride like nothing is really happening, which breaks the sense of “realism” that the film is going for. It’s insane to me that this script (written by Chris Yost, a comic book writer!) fails on such a basic level when there is such a basic formula for superhero films to follow at this point. It’s baffling.
The next big problem with this film is that it’s just poorly made. The director, Stewart Hendler, goes all over the place with his direction to the point where the best scenes are just the ones that you can describe as “competent” (minus the big tornado sequence I described above). For example, there’s a certain filter he uses for the camera early on, only for it to disappear and reappear seemingly at random, giving the film some off-putting visual inconsistency. There is also some very clumsy editing in this, with a mostly light and carefree dinner between Max, his mom (Maria Bello), and Dr. Miles Edwards (Andy Garcia), a friend of the family, and intercut with the intense and action-packed scene of Steel escaping a research lab. Hendler yanks the viewer from one scene to the other without any natural jumping-off point, making the entire experience jarring. Speaking of the actors, they’re all pretty bad in this, though with the dialogue they were given I can’t blame them. All of the young actors are flat and annoying. Winchell (who looks like a taller Josh Hutcherson but with half the talent) tries his damndest to inject some life into Max and only succeeds a handful of times, while the experienced actors like Bello and Garcia seem to literally stop at the door to collect their checks before sleepwalking their way through a scene. It’s embarrassing to see all of these people, even ones you don’t know or possibly don’t like, turn in such terrible performances like this and it makes the film grate on your nerves.
Finally, my absolute biggest problem is that this movie is just boring to watch. You all know I love to harp on Marvel, but there’s always something I enjoy about their movies, whether it’s a cool action scene or the dialogue or the characters, but this film has none of that. It’s also not dumb enough to be funny, like a Gods of Egypt or The Room, so I can’t even recommend it as a fun bad movie. It literally just is, and that is probably the worst possible thing I can say about a movie. It feels like nobody working on this film could have cared less about it and that it was just made to cash in on the name of some toy and possibly set up some sequels. It’s a dull, lifeless sack of garbage that was plastered on a screen for almost two hours and that actually felt like a chore to get through. No superhero movie, even more serious and uneven ones like Batman v Superman, has ever felt like that to me and they never should. I was at least hoping for something fun that I could talk about, but I literally have nothing but bad things for you that I didn’t have to dig into the recesses of my mind to find.
Max Steel, in a word, sucks. Calling it formulaic is an insult to formulaic movies, so I’ll just call it a subpar waste of celluloid that only serves to provide some actors and hard-working crew members with a halfway decent paycheck to feed their families with. I walked out of this movie baffled at how lame this film was, and found it to be no surprise that it was dumped on the same weekend as The Accountant, which I wish I had seen instead. Do not go see this film. Do not rent this film. Don’t borrow it, either, and don’t even bother pirating it if you’re one of those sorts of folks. Don’t give this piece of crap any more attention than I’m giving it right now, and let’s all pretend that it’s just a bad dream that never happened, okay?
My Rating: 1 star out of 5
Max Steel is in theaters now, but we all know you’re not going to see it anyway.
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