With “Max Steel”, RTL Nitro is showing one of the most boring and harebrained superhero films ever made tonight from 10.35 pm. Would probably like to be the next Iron Man, but is just a pile of electro junk…
For a change, the superhero film “Max Steel” is not based on a comic book, but on an action figure series along with the accompanying animated series. But ironically, this only makes the film more generic – as if it had simply been put together from a handful of well-known comic book franchises. Unfortunately, the result is not a technical masterpiece like Tony Stark, who welded together his Iron Man armour from electronic scraps in a cave in the desert, but a big pile of junk.
In 2009, the then still famous “Twilight” werewolf Taylor Lautner was originally supposed to take on the lead role in the live-action version – but when the time finally came in 2016, the largely unknown Ben Winchell stepped in for him instead. At the same time, however, this also meant a considerable reduction in the budget. In the end, the toy company Mattel only let them have a measly five to ten million dollars. (Competitor Hasbro is much more generous with “Transformers”, “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins” or “Barbie”).
Despite the mini-budget, “Max Steel” still turned out to be a catastrophic flop: a miserable 6.3 million dollars were collected at the North American box office (that doesn’t even cover the marketing costs). In Germany, consequently, it was only enough for a direct home cinema release:
THIS IS THE (SUPER BORING) PLOT OF “MAX STEEL “
After yet another move, teenager Max McGrath (Ben Winchell) returns to the place where his father died in a lab accident years ago. While he quickly falls for cute Sofia (Ana Villafañe) at his new school, his body goes crazy not only because of the love hormones:
Max keeps charging himself electrically until the stored energy can hardly be controlled any more. Max only gets a grip on his new abilities when he meets the alien, robot-like being Steel. Because when the alien and the teenager connect, together they mutate into the invincible superhero Max Steel…
CERTAINLY NOT AN ALTERNATIVE TO SPIDER-MAN
The parallels to Peter Parker aka Spider-Man are obvious with this plot, of course. But Ben Winchell is simply no Tom Holland or Tobey Maguire. Nevertheless, the blame does not lie solely with the pale leading man: the brooding Max is given a sidekick in the form of the alien robot Steel, who performs like a really lousy stand-up comedian, he throws out one embarrassingly inappropriate oneliner after another.
And where Spider-Man used to swing through the urban canyons of Manhattan, here Max merely jumps and flies around in an empty building ruin – spectacular is definitely not the way to go. Even when Max finally unites with Steel to form Max Steel in order to activate his barely defined “turbo powers”, the result is more reminiscent of an economy version of “Power Rangers”. Harebrained, interchangeable, boring – this is how you drive the last ounce of fun out of even a superhero story!
