Max Steel

Max Steel is based on a toy line and an animated series that I am not familiar with in the slightest.  Therefore, you will not find out from this review whether or not this movie is faithful to the source material.  If that's what you've come here for, I apologize.  Rather, the purpose of this review is prevent you from seeing it, as the movie is bad.  Very, very bad.

I have a hunch that the distributor, Open Road Films, already knows this.  They're quietly pushing this movie out with as little advertising and hype as possible, going so far as to not even hold any screenings for professional critics.  That alone should tell you enough.  But, in case you're still curious, here's some more info.  This movie is downright incoherent, with a plot that makes little sense, and characters that wish they were two dimensional.  It looks like it was expensive to make, but the filmmakers didn't bother to create any original images or ideas.  The hero of the movie wears a battle suit that resembles Iron Man, if Tony Stark happened to be a huge Power Rangers fan, and based his design of his suit on the show.  The villain wears a battle suit that looks like a reject from Tron.  The hero's sidekick is a little robot that looks like a failed design for a creature from a Star Wars movie.  The plot of the movie borrows heavily from 2002's Spider-Man film.  You get the idea.  Now that I think about it, is there anything in this movie that isn't borrowed from something else?

The plot: Our hero is Max McGrath (Ben Winchell), an average everyday teen.  And by "average", I mean he is so dull and uninteresting that he makes Peter Parker before he got the radioactive spider bite seem like Mr. Personality.  He's spent the past few years moving around to different towns and schools with his widowed mother, played by Maria Bello, an actress much too talented to be cashing a paycheck in this.  Now Max's mom has moved them back to the hometown they originally lived in, and where Max's father (played in flashbacks by Mike Doyle) was a scientist who died in a mysterious lab accident that involved an explosion and a tornado. (You figure it out.) Max wants to know about his father, and the experiment he was working on, but mom refuses to tell him.  She says it's because he's too young to know the truth, but I think it's just screenwriter Christopher Yost's way of jerking the audience around until we just don't care anymore.

As soon as Max returns to his hometown, strange things start happening to him.  A bizarre liquid energy force starts forming from his hands, which gives him the power to blow up random objects around him.  We get far too many scenes of this happening, and Max wondering what's going on, with no real explanation.  All we know is that it puts a damper on his efforts to impress the local girl he has a crush on, Sofia (Ana Villafane).   Soon, he meets up with a little floating robot named Steel (voice by Josh Brener), who has escaped from a local science lab to protect Max, and teach him how to use his new powers that have suddenly started growing within him.  Not only that, but Max and Steel can merge together somehow to form a masked superhero named Max Steel, which sounds less like a superhero, and more like the name of a porn star the more I say it.  Max Steel has the ability to run very fast, has super strength, and can shoot beams of energy.  Strange thing is he seldom if ever uses these powers during the course of the movie.  He learns he can do these things, then never does them again.

For a movie based on an action figure, the plot in Max Steel is unnecessarily vague and more confusing than it has any right to be.  Yes, we do eventually get some answers, but it's not until the final 15 minutes or so.  We spend most of the running time asking why we're supposed to care about this Max kid, who shows no personality whatsoever, and even less idea as to why this stuff is happening to him.  As soon as he arrives in his hometown, he gets superpowers.  Then, some armed men in black cars start following him everywhere he goes, seemingly wanting to kill him.  Then, he starts getting attacked by massive tornadoes, which are really evil aliens.  Then it turns out that his father's old friend who used to work at the lab with him (played by Andy Garcia, another actor too good to be cashing a paycheck here) knows more than he lets on.  Then, when the movie is practically over, we finally get to see Max in his superhero form so he can fight the villain, whose identity is kept a secret for most of the plot, but anyone in the audience who is half awake will be able to figure out their identity as soon as they walk on the screen.  It finally all ends with a big set up for sequels to come, which in this movie's case can be considered hopeless optimism.  

All of this is dropped in our laps by a cast who seem to know they're in a doomed project.  They're dull, sometimes downbeat, and often come across like they can barely suppress the doubts they have about the movie they're stuck in.  The one performance that does seem to be trying is from Josh Brener, as he at least gets to display a sense of humor and sarcasm.  Unfortunately, the lines he's been given are not funny, so his efforts are rendered mute.  It doesn't take long for the audience's interest to wane, and even less time after that for us to realize that there's no point to any of this.  It's a soulless franchise built around a toy that lacks the nostalgic power of Transformers or G.I. Joe.  This is the first product to come from the Mattel Toy Company's newly formed film studio, and you have to wonder why they chose this of all things.

Again, I hold no knowledge of the toys or cartoons that came before, so I really have no idea if Max Steel the movie is an accurate depiction, or if something got lost during its trip to the screen.  The only thing I know for sure is that this is easily the worst superhero movie I've seen since Green Lantern.

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