Real Steel Review

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly, Dakota Goyo, Anthony Mackie,

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In the future prize fighting is strictly for robots and a former boxer searches for redemption and a relationship with his son with the rise of their junkyard robots fighting career.

Jackman stars as Charlie Kenton a former Boxer who is down on his luck and just can’t catch a break with his fighting bots, he soon learns his old flame has died and now he has custody of his 11 year old son Max (Dakota Goyo) who is obsessed with Robot Boxing. While the two search for pieces to rebuild a destroyed bot, amongst the junkyard wreckage they find Atom and old sparring robot with shadow functionality who like a timex can take a licking and keep on ticking.

For the majority of two hours Charlie acts like a horse’s ass and bickers with his son like they are an old married couple. For a former boxer, who now hustles to make money off Robot Boxing Charlie is beyond stupid, not paying any attention to his robot fighter when everything is on the line or rushing into a fight without knowing how to control the robot. When his son and Atom are in the picture we are witness to “Training” although I am not exactly sure how putting a robot into shadow mode and then throwing punches and combos in front of him will make a lick of difference when you control him with voice commands (this was the poorest display of foreshadowing I have ever seen in my life). The other issue with shadow mode is that somehow even though Shadow mode basically allows the robot to do a mirror image of your moves in front of you, It miraculously somehow allows Charlie to control Atom in a fight. I am not exactly sure how Atom knows the moves when he is not looking at the fighter to mimic them but then again we are talking about a movie that has the 11 year old kid dance like an extra in a Justin Bieber Video with his Robot.

The script is laughable with Max morphing from an 11 year old child into at one point a robot mechanic (working on the robots leg), just by being around his dad.

The story is predictable, overly long and the trailers so linear that you know the entire story walking in. Real Steel is the type of movie where the less you think, the more you will enjoy it. It’s Rocky with Robots! (Literally, that’s not a cute phrase to sell the movie. If you know the story of Rocky, the fighter who fights the champion only to lose but gains a moral victory that’s Real Steel.)

Grade-73