STEEL - The Complete Saga

STEEL: The Complete Saga
Directed by Pogo
Written by Tom Bown/Red Scorpion

STEEL is one of those rare project concepts that become funnier and more entertaining the more elaborately conceived they are....up to a point, where the extra effort and polish starts to seem too seriously applied, creating an uncomfortable disconnect between the hilariously bad plot and the obvious work Pogo was putting into it. It starts off great, contains some hilarious voice acting, brilliant joke-movie-esque visual gags, and then the momentum promptly dies. After the opening titles, as the minutes tick by, you can sense with every frame the doomed nature of the premise. STEEL, by now a legendarily retarded plot concept by Tarssuin/Red Scorpion, seemed like the perfect setup for Pogo's third parody film, following Replay: Replayed and KRB Revival, but no amount of polish or attempts at meta-humor can draw anything new out of the one-trick-pony plot. You laugh several times, but at the end it all just feels kind of hollow.

For those unfamiliar with the "story," STEEL is a killer and a great fighter, who embarks on a brain-breakingly stupid adventure at the request of other killers. I would say that the wheels of the plot grind and turn right out in the open for all to see, but that would be giving the premise far too much credit. STEEL, as a literary work, doesn't have gears, or wheels, or axles, or any sort of metaphorical machinery that could be used to describe the sequence of events that occur in it. It doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as something so advanced as a wheel. In a scale comparing movie plots to levels of civilization, Killing Ramza Brave could be in the stone age, and Replay in some still-developing hunter-gatherer society, but STEEL is back in the primordial ooze. I hesitate to even say that things occur in the movie; it's more that the movie tells us they're happening.

To this end, STEEL is fascinating to watch in the way a train wreck is fascinating to watch, and this could be both its allure and its ultimate failing. Red Scorpion's premise describes STEEL and his adventures in such a naively matter-of-fact way that you can't help but just stare. Why do people want STEEL's help? Because he's a killer. He's a killer because he kills people. There's also a distinction between being a killer and a great fighter. STEEL is both, which must make him a special person indeed in this depressingly retarded universe. And of course the awe-inspiringly stupid leap of logic Red makes in explaining why killers would kidnap STEEL's family finds its way into the movie, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way. Tom Bown's script takes the flat matter-of-factness of the original premise but kills the endearing nature of Red's naive lack of imagination. The movie ends up reading to you, blankly reciting the words without doing much funny with them. I lost count the number of scenes that ended with STEEL spouting plot-advancing dialogue. Come on, who gives a shit about the plot? So many scenes in this movie fall depressingly flat because it's just a literal interpretation of what Red wrote in the STEEL thread, as if we're supposed to find a straight reading of the material funny by itself.

Not that Pogo doesn't try. It's almost painful to watch, as you can almost see his realization that this material is not enough to hold a movie together, that no amount of jokes can make it an overall positive experience, that he can stay in and keep swinging all he wants, but it will ultimately just make it a polished failure with more bells and whistles. The effort put into this project on the directorial front is exceptional. He takes the flat script and substanceless premise and finds hilarious ways of flaunting what a bad movie they inevitably make. The HOUSE OF STEEL, the family walking around in circles in the house, the absolutely terrible fight scenes, the insulting ease in which STEEL is captured because the premise requires it, the elaborate camera arcs and turns in a simple conversation scene are all staples of the fun he has with bad movies. Sometimes he (or Bown, I suppose) pushes a little too far; if STEEL isn't very interesting as a straight read of the plot-advancing material, it definitely doesn't work when he points out logical problems in the premise.

Which is the underlying problem of the movie. The concept is funny, endlessly fascinating, and captures that weird sense of schadenfreude when a movie or premise is so bad you just can't help but revel in it. But at the end of the day, it can only be vaguely entertaining. You can't really bring it to life. It has all the lasting appeal of poking a dead animal, of repeating a popular catch-phrase in the company of friends who were there when it was first uttered: you know it, they know it, and you both know that you both know it, so why say it? STEEL will interest you to the extent that your curiosity behind the legend holds out. Once you've been brought up to speed, you'll quickly want to find something else to do.

Critical Score: 53/100.
Personal Score: 55/100.