Max Steel

Unassuming teenager Max (Ben Winchell) and his widowed mother (Maria Bello) move back to the town where he was born, and where his scientist father died under strange circumstances; soon our boy finds “liquid energy” flowing from his fingers, and acquires a hovering silicon-based-life-form sidekick named Steel, who somehow lives on and enhances his latent powers while muttering cornball wisecracks. Or something like that. Mattel Toys makes a feeble stab at creating a Transformers-style franchise, with—as impossible as it sounds—even worse results. Written by Christopher L. Yost and directed by Stewart Hendler, this I Was a Teenage Iron Man wannabe is inept at every level. It sat on the shelf for two years before finally getting shoveled into theaters—a sentence that should never have been commuted. J.L.