27°C
Light rain
Fri
30°C
Sat
29°C
Sun
29°C

Powered by WeatherAPI.com

USD $1 ₱ 56.28 0.0000 March 27, 2024
March 26, 2024
Lotto 6/42
172330274012
₱ 9,522,382.20
2D Lotto 5PM
2514
₱ 4,000.00

‘Max Steel’ is Spectacular Boring

The whole story is built on hiding things from Max that really shouldn’t be hidden.

Max Steel, in the tradition of Transformers and G.I. Joe, is based on a line of action figures that became an animated series. It tells the story of teenager Max (Ben Winchell), who has just moved back into the home that he and his mother left following the mysterious death of his father. He suddenly discovers an ability to generate a strange energy that tends to wreak havoc on any technology around him. This energy also awakens Steel (voiced by Josh Brener), a parasitic alien creature that feeds on his energy and seems to know something about what happened to Max’s father.

And as it turns out, Steel can physically bond with Max and give him powerful armor with enhanced abilities. Not that this actually happens a lot. The film is sparing with the superheroics. The story mostly covers Max trying to figure out the truth behind the incident that killed his father. This is not a bad idea, but the execution is terrible. The film doesn’t really give Max any clues to follow. It instead uses the clunky of devices of memories not fully remembered, with just fragments of scenes scattered here and there, all to be filled out later at a more convenient time for the narrative.

The movie is spectacularly boring. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before, played out with almost no panache. It’s just hitting the checklist of what is expected from a film like this. There is, for example, a female character that serves as the token love interest. She doesn’t exhibit any personality past a certain point. She’s just there because teenagers are supposed to getting into this kind of thing, and it gives the main character a solid win in the end.

The eventual revelations don’t make a whole lot of sense. The whole story is built on hiding things from Max that really shouldn’t be hidden. There are a couple of characters in this film that aren’t really what they first appear to be. And in either case, it just seems like an unnecessary complication that just stretches out this already limp story. The film spends too much time having to explain the numerous convolutions. Meanwhile, it doesn’t really afford much time for the main attraction, which presumably is the superpowered armor.

Not that those scenes are really any better. The powers of the suit are pretty ill defined. Without the conceptual grounding, the things that happen in the rare action sequence don’t really add up. The film seems to imply that the suit allows Max to do all sorts of cool things, but we end up mostly seeing him punch a dude. It’s not great. Ben Winchell is a pretty bland presence in the lead role. It feels like any number of actors could have filled that role. Andy Garcia and Maria Bello slum it in supporting roles that deserve what they bring to the table.

Advertisement

Max Steel is no good, even taking into account the lowered standards that one might have for any film based on an action figure line. One could certainly just blame it all on an apparently much lower budget, but that’s probably barking up the wrong tree. Even with a smaller budget, this film could have tried harder to give itself a distinct personality; to tell a story with actual forward movement and emotional stakes. This is essentially a story of someone slowly remembering something. There may be aliens and sci-fi concepts and all that, but the core of this plot is based on waiting for all the pieces to be revealed. That’s no way to tell a story.

My Rating:

Related Content

Movie Info

Max Steel
Action, Adventure, Science Fiction
User Rating
3.3/5
13 users
Your Rating
Rate
Critic's Rating
1.0/5
Read review

Share the story

Advertisement
Advertisement

Recent Posts

Hot Off the Press