STEEL

Warner Bros. is realizing the star power of basketball stars. In SPACE JAM, Michael Jordan plays a do-or-die basketball game to defend his cartoon friends against cartoon enemies. In that movie, Jordan played a character with which he is familiar: a basketball player. In STEEL, however, Director Stephen Johnston coaches basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal out of his sports star persona and into a gentle giant, high-tech weapons commando, who fights dangerous weapons mercenary criminals with home-made super guns.

STEEL is a cross between BATMAN and RAMBO. In STEEL, US Army, high-tech weapons specialist John Henry Irons (Shaquille O’Neal) witnesses a renegade officer (Judd Nelson) turn up the power on a high-tech weapon to maximum force, which collapses a wall on the testers and their distinguished guest, a visiting US Senator, who dies in the incident. By brute strength, Irons is able to lift up a section of the fallen wall to rescue his female friend, Sparky (Annabeth Gish), who emerges paralyzed from the waist down, and so she must enters a convalescent home.

Implicating the renegade officer (Judd Nelson) at his court-martial, Irons leaves the military because of his disgust with the destruction and killing he witnesses in the Army high-tech weapons tests. Rebuffing a general’s exhortation to help the Army develop high-tech weapons production lines, he takes a job in a steel mill and moves in with his grandmother to lead a quiet life in central Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the renegade officer steals the blue prints for making the high-tech weapons and offers them to a criminal gang, who begin testing and manufacturing the weapons underneath a Los Angeles high rise office building. By coincidence, Irons happens to ride his motorcycle by the scene of a street gang who are robbing a bank, using the same high tech weapons he knew he used in the Army. Irons realizes the lethal potential destructive force of the high-tech guns in the hands of criminals, against which conventional police weapons would be ineffective. Taking the law into his own hands, he becomes a super-weapons vigilante.

Toward this end, he finds his uncle (Richard Roundtree), who runs a scrap metal junkyard, rescues Sparky from her convalescent home and enlists her cooperation in clandestinely developing home-made high-tech weapons. How the apparently poor scrap metal dealer just happens to find an extremely powerful computer capable of computer aided design and modeling, a completely electronically-equipped headquarters and a jet-equipped motorcycle for the hero is left to the viewers’ conjectures.

Nevertheless, the gentle giant commando, who carries home-made stun guns capable of blasting a concrete wall and wears steel armor reminiscent of a medieval knight, takes on the street gang in an epic fight to the finish. Not once does Irons appeal for help to the authorities, whose weapons blueprints he purloins for his private vendetta.

Does this movie carry a typical Hollywood anti-government storyline? Or is this show-business, where turning the war over to the FBI and Navy Seals would be boring, and thus unthinkable? “We’ve got to get those weapons off the street,” he later tells his uncle. Returning home, he says to his impressionable nephew “sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.” Thus, he attempts to justify his all-out high-tech vigilantism.

To the movie’s credit, Shaquille O’Neal demonstrates strong charisma and stage presence as John Henry Irons, even when he marches around in steel armor, looking like a medieval knight on Los Angeles’ mean streets. He confronts the street gang leader unarmed and demands that the leader stop abetting the super-weapons crooks. Impressed by his bravado, the gang leader stops his henchmen from shooting him as he walks away from the gang’s lair. In the movie’s climax, Irons confronts the gang as they foment murder and mayhem during their break into the Los Angeles’ branch of the Federal Reserve. One crook points his high-tech gun at a circling helicopter and shoots it out of the sky with one blast.

A cross between BATMAN and RAMBO, STEEL is a conventional good guys versus bad guys which includes a lot of violence, yet lacks maturity. 1990’s directors seem to think that they have to include certain obligatory levels of violence in order to make commercially viable movies. That is not true. Violence by itself does not sell a film. Much of the violence in STEEL is gratuitous. The street gang did not have to kill dozens of victims in its all-out robberies, and if it actually did, the incidents would have received as much publicity as did the spectacular high-tech machine-gun robbery of a North Hollywood bank in March, 1997, where the robbers out-gunned the police, although they killed no one, and made newspaper and TV headlines for days.

For all this, STEEL makes good drama, with a clear story, good cinematography, and Shaquille O’Neal’s charisma. Audiences will enjoy Shaquille O’ Neal playing an urban commando, whereas moral Americans will be repulsed by the continual and sometimes unnecessary violence.