Director Stewart Hendler
Starring Ben Winchell,Josh Brener, Maria Bello
Rated US-PG13 
Score 1/6

The adventures of teenager Max McGrath and his alien companion, Steel, who must harness and combine their tremendous new powers to evolve into the turbo-charged superhero Max Steel.

Okay I’ll admit it at my age it’s not necessarily a good thing that i have any knowledge about the source material for a franchise that was based on a toy line and subsequent science fiction animated series. But due to my supreme powers of procrastination i do.

This was the kind of movies that had an overwhelming impressive trailer and then just sort of faded into obscurity with no real sign of a definite release date. How, i come across this one? By accident on Netflix. Yup, that’s right, it’s amazing what you can find on Netflix.

I really wasn’t familiar with many people involved with the making of Max Steel and with the few people i had come across before, I expected much better from them.

Now if I had no knowledge of the franchise, it would be easy enough to dismiss the filmmakers as hacks who shouldn’t be let on to a film set ever again. Alternatively I could say that I’m 35 and this was a kids movie I knew what I was getting myself into, I’m just a sucker for punishment, and it would be easy enough to let the review end here.

However, dear readers that wouldn’t be the correct ending, because there is a third way to end this review. The real reason why Max Steel was such a bad movie, which is the same problem that has been faced by fans of the MCU and DCEU. Lazy filmmakers who don’t give a crap about the franchise that they are adapting into a movie. People might’ve said it before because it has that band wagon feel to it, so I’ll jump on the bandwagon as well ‘shinny special effects are fun and dandy but you also need to concentrate on the plot’ now just to clarify that last point when your adapting franchises, characters in your movie need to have the same arc as they did in the source material. You just can’t go radically changing things to suit your own filmmaking inadequacies.