By The new film “Real Steel” directed by Shawn Levy and starring Hugh Jackman is a profoundly stupid movie. Almost nothing that happens in the film makes any kind of logical sense. However, it is not as terrible as a film with this storyline can be.
The film takes place in the near future somewhere around 2020. According to this vision of the future, nothing much happens in this timeframe, except that iPhones are much thinner and made of clear plastic for some reason, and boxers have been replaced by 8-foot-tall fighting metal robots. Besides those two things, everything else pretty much looks exactly the same.
Charlie Kenton (Jackman) is a down-on-his-luck robot boxer who buys old broken-down robots to fight in underground matches to pay off his gambling debts. He was once a great boxer back in the day when humans fought each other, but he is pretty terrible at robot boxing. Most of his matches end with his machines being smashed into heaps of warped metal, putting him even deeper in debt.
When he’s not playing a giant version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots, he spends his time at a robot boxing gym owned by his beautiful friend Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), who helps him fix his destroyed fighters. The robots are never seen actually training in the gym, and it makes no sense why brainless robots would even need a gym in the first place.
After a few failed fights, Charlie is informed that his ex-girlfriend, whom he abandoned for an unexplained reason, has died of an unexplained illness and he now has to take care of his estranged son, Max (Dakota Goyo).
Max wants nothing to do with his loser father, but he is interested in the sport of robot boxing. While searching for spare parts, he accidentally falls off a cliff and finds an old sparring bot named “Atom” buried underground. The robot has some unique features including a “shadow feature,” which allows it to learn moves by watching and mimicking human movements. This, of course, leads to multiple scenes of Max and the robot dancing to hip-hop music.
The bulk of the film is spent watching Charlie and Max bonding while teaching their new robot to fight. Atom becomes an underdog hero, quickly fighting his way to the top.
The father-son drama is cliche, but works. This is mainly due to the acting talent of Jackman and Goyo. Charlie starts out as a truly terrible human being, and it is surprising that the film is able to make viewers care about him by the end.
The robot fight scenes are by far the best parts of the film. Watching the giant robots bash the bolts out of each other is surprisingly entertaining, and they make it believable that this ridiculous sport could take off in America someday. However, the film never really explains how the robots function at all. There are some times when Atom seems to understand English and has his own thoughts, and there are other times when he seems to only be able to follow commands.
The story is essentially a recycled mash-up of every other underdog boxing film ever made, but there are enough robot versus robot thrills to make up for the cliché plot. If you are intent on seeing a robot-boxing movie this year, this one isn’t half bad.
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