These were the dark times. Times long before the likes of Dark Knight Trilogies and Infinity Wars; times when Hollywood’s grasp of comic book literature was sketchy at best and downright ridiculous at worst. Heroes tried to stand against the darkness; heroes such as Batman, Spawn and a pound shop crack at Captain America attempted to push back such insurmountable issues such as wonky effects, weird tones and a complete disregard for the source material but to no avail. But if such household names couldn’t save the day, what chance could a black hero based on a lesser known character have?
A damn good one as it happens as this hero not only forged his own path, but cleaved a way for others such as Spider-Man and the X-Men to rise up and achieve greatness. The good news is that the character was Blade; the bad news is that this review is dedicated to that other black superhero that got a late nineties release. This is going to get pretty bad, so steel yourself…
Despite being a virtual mountain of a man, military weapons designer John Henry Irons is actually something of a kind soul despite clocking in at around 7 feet tall. We get a look at just how decent this guy is when a colleague of his, the unscrupulous Nathaniel Burke, deliberately overloads one of Irons’ prototype sonic cannons in order to show the gathered brass what it can really do. The results are catastrophic and leaves Irons’ partner, Susan “Sparky” Sparks, with spinal injuries that put her in a wheelchair for life.
Immediately, Irons quits the weapons business and testifies against Burke in a tribunal that gets the asshole booted from the military – however, a simple discharge isn’t going to be enough to slow the toll of Burke’s ambition and before you know it, he’s selling Irons’ weapons to street gangs out of a local arcade.
Meanwhile, Irons has returned to his old neighbourhood, but is horrified to see his designs shooting up police on the local news, so he vows to do something about it. After confronting some of the criminals mid-heist with disastrous results, he figures that he’s going to have to fight fire with fire and immediately yanks Sparky out of the veterans hospital she’s been moping in and puts together a makeshift lab in order to create something to end this high-tech crime wave. With the help of Uncle Joe, the group manages to put together a suit of armour and some nifty weapons to turn Irons into the the vigilante known as “Steel”. Quite how the police can’t put together that the only 7 foot plus black dude in the area is something you’d have to take up with the filmmakers, but as Steel uses his nifty collection of gadgets to get ever closer to destroying Burke’s operation, the cops do everything that they can to bring the seemingly invincible steel clad crimefighter to justice. Mettle will be tested – most likely yours.
With the amount of urban black superheroes that hurled themselves at the genre in the late nineties, I guess one of them had to crack the zeitgeist, but it wasn’t Spawn and it sure as Hell wasn’t Steel. In fact, while the superhero genre has improved in leaps and bounds regardless of the skin colour of the lead, Steel ultimately proves to be the exact type of example of movie that kept the medium down for so long. However, it’s not like the filmmakers were doing it in purpose and even though there’s a lot wrong with Shaquille O’Neal’s foray into on-screen crimefighting, at least it’s attempted in the spirit of goodwill. However, while such names as producer Quincy Jones and writer/director Kenneth Johnson are obviously doing everything to put an admirably positive look at inner city life and to bring a warmth to the glimpses of the black community, it does so in a way that’s so unsubtle, it ends up having the forced cheerfulness of an extra cheesy toy commercial or an after school special that’s so niave, it just makes you want to do exactly what it’s warning you away from. What’s even weirder is that even though the character is based on a hero from DC Comics who essentially built his suit to emulate a dead Superman, Steel: the movie opts to ditch any serious references to the Man Of Steel and essentially rewrites his backstory and supporting cast completely. Would this have made a better movie – with Shaq involved, possibly not – but it just goes to show how little respect filmmakers had for comic history back in the nineties.
I guess if you were six, Steel would have been quite the adventure, especially considering that despite having the proportions of a literal giant, Shaq spends the majority of the film being as cuddly and vanilla as he can possibly be – even while locked in his plastic looking super suit. However, it’s tough for any of the central messages to punch through the wall of sacherine niceness that soon just becomes overwhelmingly fake and incredibly irritating in virtually no time at all. It’s bad enough that the cast is mostly required to act as deliriously cheerful as a clutch of pod people and that the majority of Judd Nelson’s pantomime villainy is channeled through a particularly distracting army haircut and plenty flaring of nostrils; but Shaq skillfully puts in one of the worst hero performances in superhero history. Be it delivering a running joke that Irons is shit at throwing things into other things, to trying to perk up his paraplegic partner by throwing open a window, Shaq attacks every scene with the same, easy going charm that convincingly pegs him as a nice guy, but abandons him when he has to literally do anything else but deliver an amiable grin.
It also doesn’t help that the action is mostly just vague forgettable string sequences of Shaq strapped into his lumbering armour as he wades through endless and repetitive explosions. OK, so he gets to rife a motorcycle, but so did virtually every other superhero of the decade and even though the character has a sledgehammer that can turn into a sonic rifle and a magnet, don’t you think it’s odd that he doesn’t once use it like… oh I don’t know, a hammer? Also, before I forget, why do so many people seem to be aiming for Steel’s crotch during the cast amounts of firefights the film has?
There’s good stuff here buried deep under the scrap. Richard Rowntree seems to be enjoying saying things like “well dip me in shit and roll me in breadcrumbs” in a kids film and you can’t deny the well meaning (if clumsily handled) nature of the positive nature of the thing. However, the sight of one of basketball’s most famous faces lumbering around like a thrift shop Robocop and beating up PG gangbangers who yell things like “light him up like a joint!” remains one of the darkest moments that this period of comic book movies had to give us – even with a scene involving a rocket powered, laser shooting wheelchair. You want to treat it like a kids film, be my guest – but for a rare moment where a DC character other that Batman or Superman actually got a movie, Shaq simply drops the ball.
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