By Emilio Frenk
Director: Stewart Hendler
Cast: Ben Winchell, Josh Brener, María Bello, Ana Villafañe, Mike Doyle and Andy García.
Rating: Poor.
Max Steel, The Action Figure from the toy company Matell is now on the big screen and the results are very poor.
The movie opens with Max McGrath (Ben Winchell) a teenager who moves with his mother Molly (María Bello) to the town where he was born.
In the aftermath he begins to develop a special gift that is attracting electronic and metal things and he will be joined by Steel (Josh Brener) and alien his father created and is assigned to protect Max.
Eventually Max will be envolved in his father’s research and when he finds out about the truth of the accident he suffered, him and Steel will combine their powers and become the turbo- charged superhero Max Steel.
When I was watching this movie, I was looking at an exact carbon copy of Iron Man but everything went wrong.
The directing by Stewart Hendler and the writing by Christopher Yost was very poor and the quality of the film speaks for itself.
The excesive abuse of flashbacks was notorious in this film and they were moments that I was about to walk out the theater because I didn’t care of any of the characters.
I’m surprised of actors like Andy García and María Bello would accept to do this movie in which nothing works and is slow from beginning to end.
In a superhero movie even though sometimes the length can be around two hours, the pacing needs to be fast and you need moments that as an audience member you can identify with the characters. Here there weren’t any of those moments.
The past statement also applies with characters that are based in action figuresand need to be entertaining.
Christopher Yost who wrote also Thor:The Dark World and cartoon series that involve superheros knows how to write this type of characters but here there were elements that didn´t work at all.
About Stewart Hendler I hope this a learning lesson from him and hopefully his next project will bring a better result.
With that being said “Max Steel” is one of the worst movies of this year and it has been one of the worst superhero movies I`ve seen in while.