Max Steel (2016)

There is a particular kind of fatigue that settles over the critic when confronted with a film that has no opinions about anything. Max Steel, a 2016 adaptation of a Mattel action figure, arrives with the solemn purpose of selling toys and departs having accomplished very little else. The plot concerns a teenager named Max McGrath, an alien companion named Steel, and a corporate executive named Miles Edwards who betrays his friend for a power source. It is the sort of premise that could carry a message if anyone involved had thought to include one. They did not. Critics at the time reached for words like bland and forgettable, and they were being generous with the second one.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a barren field. Ana Villafañe appears as Sofia Martinez and Andy García as the villain, both natural casting decisions that the screenplay never once pauses to examine. Maria Bello's Molly is revealed in the final act to be the majority shareholder of N-TEK, a detail that flickers past with no follow-through, since she spends the rest of the runtime worrying about her son like a woman in a different, gentler movie. The antagonist is a corporate man undone by greed, which sounds like a critique of something until we notice it is the same motivation every comic-book villain has possessed since the printing press. No environment is defended. No history is revised. No body is celebrated, no mind is explored, no identity is interrogated.

The film preaches nothing, which is its one honest quality. It simply exists, a stillborn franchise starter that grossed six million dollars against a ten million dollar budget and vanished from theaters with the quiet dignity of a recalled product. We are left to classify it, and classification is mercifully brief. A superhero origin story, based on a toy, devoid of argument. Some films demand our outrage. This one does not even demand our attention, and it received exactly that.