John Henry Irons (Shaquille O’Neal) is one of the Army’s top weapons designers but, after a malfunction at a demonstration leads to the death of a senator and the crippling of Irons’s closest friend, Sparky (Annabeth Gish), Irons resigns and goes to work at a steel mill. Irons wants nothing more to do with violence and destruction, but then he discovers that a former colleague, Nathaniel Burke (Judd Nelson), has set himself up as an arms dealer and is selling Irons’s weapons to the local street gangs. With the help of Sparky and his Uncle Joe (Richard Roundtree), Irons descends into the local junkyard and returns with a clanky suit of armor and an electromagnetic hammer.
“Hammer time!” Irons announces.
“I love the shaft!” Uncle Joe says.
Now known as Steel, Irons sets out to save Los Angeles from Judd Nelson.
Steel is a good example of what comic-book movies used to be like. In DC Comics, John Henry Irons was a steelworker who became a hero when it appeared that Superman had been killed by Doomsday. He wore a cape in honor of Superman and fought to keep Superman’s ideals alive. In the movie version, Steel is a former weapons designer who doesn’t wear a cape and looks really silly in his clunky suit of armor. The special effects are noticeably cheap and the villain’s plan is simplistic. Burke wants to sell weapons and, coincidentally, he does it in the same neighborhood his former coworker moved to. Watching the movie, I had to keep reminding myself that this was actually released in theaters. (I saw it in a theater!) The whole thing has a made-for-TV feel.
Of the cast, Richard Roundtree gives the best performance and appears to be having a good time as Uncle Joe. Judd Nelson is hammy as the villain, but that’s the way the role was written, and at least Nelson didn’t try to pretend Steel was something it wasn’t. Shaquille seems to be trying really hard as Irons. Shaq has never been a great actor, but he’s got enough natural likability to carry him through. Unfortunately, he looks ridiculous in the armor. In a comic book, donning a costume is what transforms an average person into a superhero. But Shaq is already 7’1″, so the costume doesn’t even feel necessary. Just give him the hammer and let him call himself Thor.
Released at the same time as Batman & Robin, Steel was a box-office bomb and contributed to the general feeling that, unless a film featured Batman or Superman, the public didn’t care about comic-book movies. Three years after Steel came and went, the first X-Men film would prove the doubters wrong.
