Steel

Shaquille O'Neal is a superhero?! This is the perfect movie to review for the Sports and Superheroes blog! Steel came out in 1997, was directed by Kenneth Johnson, and stars Shaq in the title role, Annabeth Gish as his girlfriend and Judd Nelson as the bad guy.

This movie was less about telling the story of of the superhero Steel, as much as it was about finding an action movie for Shaq to star in. He had already made Kazaam, which was a flop, but that didn't stop his acting or rapping career. This movie was produced by Quincy Jones, who is a legendary music producer — not a movie producer. He found Kenneth Johnson to write the screenplay and direct the movie because he had directed the '70s Incredible Hulk TV show. But at this point, Johnson was sick of superheroes, so he intentionally cut back on most superhero elements in the movie and basically ended up with an action movie that vaguely resembles a comic book character.

Steel was created by DC in 1993 after the death of Superman. He was a scientist who decided that Metropolis needed a hero in Superman's absence. So he created a suit of steel that covered his entire body and put a Superman shield on his chest, wore a big red cape and told everyone that he was Superman's consciousness in the body of a robot. The charade didn't last long, but Steel remained a hero and ally of the real Man of Steel to this day. Steel was also one of the very few black heroes in comic books, which is probably the No. 1 reason why he was chosen for Shaq. I guess another possibility would have been Luke Cage, but he's in Marvel, and that probably would have been more complicated to work with at the time (this was still pre-X-Men).

This film was shot in 1996, and was on a very tight schedule. Shaq was in the Olympics in Atlanta, and had to work with an acting coach to learn the script in-between games. As soon as the Olympics ended, they only had five weeks to shoot before Shaq had to report to the Lakers training camp in Hawaii. So if this movie felt rushed, it's because it was. On a related note, Shaq's Lakers finished the '96-97 season by getting knocked out of the second round by the Utah Jazz.

To recap: Shaquille O'Neal, an amazing basketball player, but not a great actor, became the star of a movie produced by a man who didn't know how to make movies and a director who didn't want to make a superhero movie. What could go wrong?

The movie begins with John Henry Irons, his girlfriend Susan Sparks, and Nathaniel Burke demonstrating new weapons for the Army. The first is a laser cannon that can quickly decommission a tank. The second weapon produces a big nonlethal shockwave (they make a big deal about how Johnny doesn't want to kill anyone). Burke, however, is determined to show just how powerful these new weapons are, so he sets it to the maximum setting and accidentally causes the building they're in to collapse. Sparks is buried under the rubble and becomes paralyzed.

Later, Johnny testifies in military court against Burke, who is dismissed. Johnny's tour is up, so he decides to return home to Los Angeles and live a weapons-free life. He moves back in with his grandma and little brother, and there's a really annoying running gag about the grandma always cooking a soufflé and demanding everybody whisper so it doesn't collapse. These prolonged whispering scenes only further compound the basic sound problems this movie suffered from. I never could hear anybody talking and had to crank up the volume, but then the action scenes or any music playing would be ridiculously loud.

The music of the movie was also quite disappointing. Quincy Jones put together a "popping fresh" soundtrack of wannabe hit original singles that were cheesily upbeat and reeked of the '90s. Shaq, who also wanted to be a rapper at this point, contributed a single to the album, but the feature song, "Steel Yourself," was written by director Kenneth Johnson. Similar to Howard the Duck, I think the main people making this movie saw it as a vehicle for their budding music careers, which never took off. Besides all the hip hop songs, Steel features one orchestral heroic theme that was very generic and way overused in the movie.

Back to the movie, Burke decides to move to Los Angeles to plot his revenge against Johnny. Burke finds a shady businessman, who uses an arcade store as a front. The arcade store is interesting. We get a couple of shots of NBA Jam, but ironically, the Clippers are playing instead of the Lakers. We also catch a brief glimpse of a Batman Forever game. So that means either this movie is set in a different universe as Batman, or in that universe, they create video games based on real-life events. Considering the wackiness of both these movies, I'd say the second possibility is more than likely. Anyway, Burke teams up with this businessman to start mass-producing these new advanced weapons. We also see Burke develop into an irrationally evil bad guy who readily kills anybody who slightly angers him. He also gets a black henchman who insisted on talking in a ridiculously low voice. I couldn't take anything he said seriously, and apparently neither did the filmmakers because he got less and less lines as the movie progressed.

One night, Johnny decides to hook up with his old cop girlfriend and they drag his little brother to a meeting about gangs or something like that. On the way, they're attacked by a gang using the advanced weapons supplied by Burke and Johnny's cop girlfriend is seriously wounded. She's never seen or heard from again in the movie. Johnny sees one of the gang members running away, so he chases after him on foot. And thus begins one of the longest, slowest-paced chase scenes I've ever seen.

I can only assume that Shaq was saving himself for the upcoming basketball season, because he didn't even try to pretend to run. He just went at a slow-paced jog that really was more of a trot. So on one hand, you had this punk kid full-on sprinting away, while a 7-foot, 300-pound man slowly trotted after him. Another problem with using Shaq in movies is that you can never find a stunt double for him. He is literally the only man in the world that size. So we saw him pull off a couple of "stunts," which really were very slow and carefully controlled hopping over walls and short fences. At one point, the punk slides through a small opening in a locked gate, so Shaq rips the gate door off its hinges. If Johnny was this strong already, why'd he need to create the Steel armor? The "chase" then leads to a train yard, where lots of cars and tracks are moving and we get probably a dozen very slow close calls. This part in the movie lasts forever. We want to see Steel — not Shaq trotting around a train yard. Then, the scene finally ends with the punk kid getting away. So we did all that trotting, wall-hopping and gate-ripping for nothing.

Johnny then calls up his old general to tell him he's seen his new highly-classified weapons on the street. The stupid general doesn't believe him, not once considering that the recently-dismissed Burke could possibly re-create the same weapons he helped develop. This general is almost as irresponsible as the one that sold P.N. Guin the nuclear submarine. Johnny was so upset with the general that he destroyed the pay phone he was on. Yes, this was 1997, and people still had to use pay phones. In another nod to the '90s, Burke decides to create a "Web page" to sell his weapons on, but it takes him a week to create it and send it out "internationally." And the page looks like crap once it's finished, by the way.

So yeah, Johnny somehow finds out that Sparks is in a veterans hospital in St. Louis and is deeply depressed. Johnny visits her and asks her to help him fight Burke. She refuses, so he literally picks her up in her wheelchair and carries her out the room. He takes her to his uncle's junkyard (he apparently had an uncle who is a mechanics expert) and they set up a secret crime-fighting base there. Sparks eventually agrees to help them and she becomes a sort of Oracle-type sidekick for Steel. Sadly, they never call her Oracle, which would have been awesome. But actually, the best element of this movie was watching Sparks come to terms with her disability. It was genuine and gradual and probably would've been heartwarming had we not had Shaq constantly standing close by flashing his signature smile.

They build the Steel armor montage-style, with the director's "Steel Yourself" blasting away. It is an overly positive song about standing up for what's right and all that jazz. Finally, after about half the movie has gone by, we see Johnny put on the Steel suit. Now this moment is supposed to be the most powerful, amazing moment of every superhero movie. But here, it sucked. I laughed out loud the first time I saw that suit. It looked so awful! It also didn't make any sense, leaving so much of Johnny's face exposed, as well as his palms. It was so strange — he had gloves that only protected the backs of his hands. And then he had his hammer that didn't look or act like a hammer at all. Ninety percent of the time he used it as a gun, so I don't see why he couldn't have used a gun instead — the director had already changed so many things about the character, why stop there? But despite all the problems with the suit, I probably could have accepted it had Shaq not been smiling so much. Look, I know you're happy and excited to be dressing up like a superhero, but you have to at least pretend to be serious for a little bit here. You're chasing bad guys! Don't smile at them!

Anyway, Steel's first night on the job goes fairly well. He disarms some gang members by using his hammer to magnetize his suit and draw all their guns toward him. The cops then show up, which Sparks annoyingly refers to as the "blues" throughout the whole movie. (Why do you need a code word for them? Just say cops.) Steel escapes the police by using a grappling hook to scale a building. He then tries to jump to another rooftop, but Sparks tells him it's too far. Johnny, though, confidently tells her he took second-place in the long jump in high school, and he barely makes the jump. He then gets on a motorcycle and leads another long, obligatory and boring chase scene, before he finally loses them in the junkyard.

The next night, Burke's men rob a bank and videotape their weapons in action to put on the news. Steel tries to stop them, but ultimately fails when one of the punks shoots down a police helicopter and Steel is slightly injured (cuts his chin and breaks a rib) while saying an officer. The video footage gets out showing Steel using a weapon just like the gang's, and the police immediately peg John Henry Irons as a suspect. I mean, how many guys as tall as him are also notable weapons experts? Johnny goes home and has an intense whispering conversation with his grandma (she was baking another soufflé) and she basically comes out and says she knows he's Steel. I mean, it was pretty obvious. Suddenly, the SWAT team comes crashing through the windows and Johnny beats a few of them up before finally surrendering. He's taken to jail, and the one officer he saved nobly decided not to identify him as the vigilante.

Johnny, though, still had to be held on suspicion, so Sparks used her computer-hacking skills to release him. She called the district attorney, recorded his voice, and sent that through the computer so when she called the jail, she sounded like the district attorney. She also discovered Burke's "Web page" that actually only gives the time and address for the weapons auction. This part is pretty funny, because they have to take a long time to explain how the Internet works. All the gangs around the world are quite amazed that such valuable information could be conveyed through computers.

Anyway, Johnny gets back with his uncle and his Steel suit, but Burke had somehow managed to kidnap Sparks and Johnny's little brother. Everything at this point really becomes a blur to me, but I remember Steel trying to save them and getting captured himself, but then they're freed when he tricks Burke into activating his magnet and Sparks reveals she's equipped her wheelchair with laser guns. Somehow, Steel ends up in a room with his brother and a bad guy throws a grenade in there, and the only way to get rid of the grenade is for Steel to throw it out a small hole roughly 10 feet up on the wall. Earlier in the movie, we saw Johnny no less than three times attempt to shoot a basketball or throw something in a garbage can and miss terribly. Each time, he'd just shrug, turn to the camera, and say, "I never was good at free throws." So here, with the live grenade in his hand, he shouted to his little brother, "I was never good at these!" So his little brother told him to bend his knees and follow through, which he did and got the grenade out of the room.

Oh, and at some point he got into a final confrontation with Burke, who once again decided to set his shockwave gun at too high a setting and blast Steel with it. The shockwave bounced off Steel's suit, hit Burke, and caused the building to collapse and kill him. The movie ends with everybody visiting Grandma's restaurant, where she proudly shows off the soufflé she was finally able to make. And then Sparks shows Johnny a feature on her wheelchair and enables her to stand up so she can hug him (after he still has to bend over a whole lot).

So yeah, that was Steel, the last movie Shaquille O'Neal ever starred in. It was made with a $16 million budget, but astonishingly only made $1.7 million. They lost almost 90 percent of the money they spent! At least Howard the Duck broke even! I think there are three main things that led to this movie being such a colossal failure:

First, the budget. A certain amount of money is required to be spent on a superhero movie. Howard the Duck came out 10 years before Steel, but its budget was more than double Steel's — and it was one of the worst superhero movies I've ever seen! You just need some money for special effects, which this movie had none basically. They had their weird little laser/shockwave guns, but they never did anything visually impressive. Steel's suit also looked awful, and was really cumbersome, making any action scenes with it near-unwatchable. So they tried to throw in as many action scenes as they could without the suit, but those also were near-unwatchable because they were so boring. At the end of the day, if you want to make money, you need to be willing to spend some money.

Second, the superhero aspect. This was a superhero movie that was ashamed to admit that it was a superhero movie. There were only a couple of moments that dared to admit this could be a DC character. One was Shaq's Superman tattoo — the classic S-shield surround by the words "Man of Steel." His tattoo was displayed prominently in the movie, and his uncle even called him the Man of Steel once, but they never addressed whether his tattoo was honoring the fictional character Superman or the real-life hero over in Metropolis. We also heard a cop suggest Steel had hidden in the Batcave, and Steel's little brother asked if he could be his Robin. But these Batman references, along with the Batman Forever arcade game, don't really encourage the idea of Steel living in the same world as the Dark Knight. But the biggest problem was how the movie tried to stay away from all superhero elements, but occasionally had to deal with a few unavoidable things that really felt out of place. If you don't want to make a superhero movie, then don't. Just make an action movie. But if you're going to take a superhero's name and likeness, then you need to take all the aspects of that character, or you'll end up with a movie like this — confused and empty.

And the third fatal flaw of this movie was Shaquille O'Neal. It's not entirely fair to say he's a bad actor, because he really never was an actor to begin with. While other movie stars spent their lives studying drama and starring in plays, commercials, TV shows and movies, Shaq was practicing and playing basketball — as he should have been. He eventually won four NBA championships, and he became the first player since Michael Jordan to win three consecutive Finals MVP awards, which is no small feat. But when a superstar like Shaq tries to use his celebrity to invade other forms of media, be it music or movies, it becomes rather insulting to the dedicated professionals who have spent their whole lives at the art. There must have been a hundred other actors who were more qualified, capable and willing to play the part of Steel, but Shaq got it because he's Shaq. And that really isn't fair. Now, if Shaq were an excellent actor, then that'd be a different story, but he isn't. He has a very likable personality, and can goof off and be funny with the best of them, excelling in the All-Star game and kids award shows. He's also great in 30-second commercials, but anything that requires extended speaking is not good for him. He tends to mumble a lot and fall into an emotionless monotone, which can make him unbearable on Inside the NBA, and really unbearable in movies. As odd as this sounds, Kazaam was actually a much better movie for Shaq. There, he was a goofy, out-of-place genie that liked to rap, dance and party. But the role of John Henry Irons was much more complex, and he failed at it — generally under-acting, but occasionally over-acting in some moments. And never, not once in the movie did you forget that he was Shaquille O'Neal, NBA superstar, and it didn't help that the movie kept throwing in basketball references. So yes, the lesson is that Shaq could not and can not be the star of a movie. He can make cameos, he can star in commercials, but he can't carry a full feature-length film.

Steel was a horrible, horrible movie. And it wasn't all Shaq's fault. If you replaced Shaq with Will Smith, but still had the same script and budget, I think this movie still would've been a failure. It would have made more money, but not too much. Sadly, this is perhaps the only superhero movie with a black guy in the title role, and it was a failure. Equally sad, this was one of the few non-Batman or Superman DC movies, and it was a flop. It's movies like this that give superheroes a bad name.

Final score: 0