Real Steel

Real Steel is about robot boxing. It’s not a premise that gets me extremely excited but I decided to watch anyway to pass the time. Perhaps because of my low expectations, I ended up being pleasantly surprised. The director has added a flavor to this seemingly cookie-cutter movie that increases its enjoyability. To begin with, this sci-fi romp spends most of its time following around its protagonist, Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), in a battered up truck through cornfields and other rural areas. Not a sci-fi cityscape created on an animator’s desktop. In fact, besides these highly advanced robots and a couple of fancier touchscreens, people seem to be living in a world less advanced than ours today. Perhaps this is supposed to be more of an alternate reality than the future itself.

                Jackman’s Kenton is a mean and gruff alcoholic who was once a boxer but now acts as a manager for the robots who box in his place. In fact, human boxing has been outlawed. Right when he loses his last robot and everything looks lost, Kenton’s eleven year old son, Max, returns into his life picture. The story arc is quite obvious from here but its fun getting to where it will all inevitably lead. Jackman chooses to portray Kenton as a truly abrasive man. He is visibly mean to Max and very clearly only cares about his robots and how much money they can make him. His heart is clearly still in boxing so he does whatever he can to stay close to the game.

                During a junkyard run for abandoned robot parts, the pair stumble upon “Atom”, an older model robot who has the apparently rare ability to “mimic” his trainer’s movements. On a side note, the CGI behind these robots is well implemented. They look real enough to be giant metal monsters but their fast movements and punches have real weight behind them. Kudos to the animators. Along with “Atom” Kenton Sr. and Kenton Jr. start winning small matches and finally get a shot at the big league. Along the way, Max outfits the robot with more and more advanced features since every pre-teen kid in a movie is an expert electrical and mechanical engineer. Atom himself is designed well to  look appealing. Although he towers over both Jackman and the kid, he is almost cute compared to the monstrosities he fights in the ring.

                Evangeline Lilly is present as Charlie’s girlfriend Bailey. Her talents as demonstrated on Lost are wasted here. She is Charlie’s squeeze for the duration of the movie but we don’t get to see any of it develop – just told multiple times that they grew up together.

                By the end of the movie everyone will be cheering for Max and his dad to beat the big bad robot, Zeus, designed by a Japanese guy and run by a techy-looking Indian. There’s even a Russian lady spending her money on Zeus so that we have every ethnic baddy covered. Despite some of the more amateurish and cliche aspects of this movie, it develops well and delivers a knockout punch of mindless entertainment.

Trailer