There should be a massive study of the film industry in Hollywood. As a screenwriter who has written several screenplays, I knew from day one the extremely low odds of ever breaking into the movie industry as a screenwriter. I also know how difficult it is to write a 100-page quality screenplay that follows the paradigm that film producers want and also follows the exact syntax that screenwriting agents in the movie industry expect. All screenwriters hear about the thousands of screenplays that are written every year and how so many are so quickly rejected and never even read by anyone. There are screenwriting contests where people have a remote chance at winning a screenwriting contest that one would hope to somehow break them into this impossible field. Other than that, its just pure luck or contacts that might give you that 1 in a million miracle opportunity.
Then a movie like "Max Steel" makes it to movie theaters and a major sense of disbelief sets in almost immediately as you sit through this mess of two wasted hours. When you consider the extremely long odds for any script, how could a screenplay this bad ever be greenlighted into a movie? On top of this, how can two well-respected actors like Maria Bello and Andy Garcia be in this terrible film? Was it because of favors they owed? Were they having financial problems? Were they worried that if they don't work often enough, producers might forget about them? How much were they paid for this embarrassingly bad movie? Perhaps this movie was made because Max Steel is owned by Mattel as some kind of a toy and they thought that it had a ready-made audience, so they just slapped any horrible script together, thinking that it really didn't make any difference if the story was any good.
Within any movie, there is a story and most especially for a science fiction film technology has to be explained as well as the story or at least make some sort of sense. This movie made no sense. Nothing was explained. There is a young man about 17 who had a genius father who died, who started a technology company that created some sort of liquid energy and then for reasons completely unknown, there are aliens who become involved, or his father is an alien, and then there is this robot bat-like creature who follows the young man around to help him absorb his energy bursts so he doesn't explode. Believe it or not, this is the plot of this terrible movie. The young man is played by newcomer, Ben Winchell and overall there is nothing wrong with his acting in this horrible movie, but the screenplay is so bad none of this matters. His girlfriend is played by the only bright spot in this film, Ana Villafañe who looks like she might have a very promising career in the movie industry and is currently on Broadway in "On your Feet", the musical about Gloria Estefan and her husband. Unfortunately, she is on screen only a few times, not nearly enough to rescue this nightmare of 2 hours. One last thing that makes this movie especially bad is that the main character at certain points along with Andy Garcia are able to transform themselves into a metal suit that is a total rip off of the Iron Man franchise. The suit even had a light in the middle of its chest like Iron Man. How they were able to get away with this, who knows.
In my opinion, Max Steel is one of the worst movies of 2016, along with the "The Lobster", which is also reviewed in this blog. How this movie was even released to anything but a DVD as a B movie is amazing. Someone must have made a mistake somewhere because this movie is at best a low-level B or C movie and should be missed.
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