Review of Max Steel (2016) by Jeffknox — 23 Feb 2017

SPOILERS AHEAD.

What comes to mind watching this movie is a lame attempt from the early 2000's to try out something new before superhero movies were big. But now superhero movies have been taken seriously for over a decade and there's no excuse for this kind of bad writing.

It starts out interesting enough but soon delves into a snorefest. The first half of the movie I feel like Max is constantly running from something. STOP RUNNING AND DO SOMETHING INTERESTING, DAMN IT. When agents are chasing him there's nothing interesting to it. No badass fights...just Max doing what he does best, running. The first real fight he has is with a wind-like creature and like everything else, is uneventful. He does an energy blast to take it down and that's it. The fight seems very pointless and even by the end of the movie it has you scratching your head. The second fight is the last and with the main villain. This fight is also uneventful where nothing cool happens. Most of it is the villain monologuing. When a villain has to explain the movie to you in one of the last scenes it shows how lazy the writers are. Don't have a character explain it all to me at the end, show me the story throughout the movie. Make me care about the villain and his motives, don't just vomit the point during the last fight. Give them interesting dialogue instead. Some other points:

I'm not sure what tone they were going for. It seemed to have a semi-serious tone but when Steel shows up the tone changes to a corny comedy. If it was going to be a corny comedy it should have started out as such. When Steel shows up Max's mom shouts from downstairs, "dinner is ready" (or something along those lines) but she can't hear Max when he's yelling and breaking stuff because he's freaked out when Steel appears? Also, nobody in the film seems to notice Steel. When Max keeps him in his backpack, Steel will be talking and Max can hear him but nobody else seems to really notice. It's supposed to be for comedic relief but it doesn't work if it doesn't make sense. The whole movie screams of crappy lazy writing.

Why did Max get his powers when they moved to that specific place? I don't think it was explained in the movie. The movie would have been so much better if it focused less on story and just tried to be a fun action-packed beat em up superhero movie. The story was so boring, didn't make sense, so obviously lazy, and devoid of any good action. They should have given just a little bit of story (that made sense) and made Max into a badass instead. Wrecking the day of the agents, having cool boss battles, etc. Even if it ended up being mediocre it would have been a fun afternoon watch.

There's a lot more that's wrong with the movie but this is the stuff that comes to mind right now.