Movie Reviews
The hokey bot-boxing melodrama stars Hugh Jackman as a down-on-his-luck dad attempting to reconnect with his spunky long-lost son.
Rocky the Robot would have been the most accurate title for this bot-boxing melodrama, which feels like a mashup of spare parts from Transformers, The Champ, Star Wars and Sylvester Stallone's series, among other cash cows of various vintages. Attempting to tell a heartwarming tale of the redemption of a washed-up fighter in a sports world dominated by metal-crunching mechanical pugilists, this punishingly predictable tale will test whether sci-fi action fanboys can stomach having their cherished genre infiltrated by sentimental hokum about a down-on-his-luck dad and his spunky long-lost son. The likeliest box-office outlook is a split decision.
Guided by a large and august creative team seemingly dedicated to making a film without a speck of originality, this DreamWorks production for Disney is based on the 1956 short story “Steel” by Richard Matheson, who seven years later adapted it for an episode of The Twilight Zone. In it, Lee Marvin starred as a former boxer who, in a future world (1974) in which human boxing has been outlawed and replaced by android combatants, disguises himself as a robot to fight a mechanical opponent.
With Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks on board, the Transformers connection is felt heavily, even if the bots are neither so enormous nor numerous. In fact, the first ramshackle tin can of a fighter promoted by bottom-feeding hustler Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) isn't even strong enough to put up a fight against a live bull at a Western county fair in the film's opening action sequence.
As close to the gutter as Mickey Rourke was at his ebb in The Wrestler, Charlie is crude, argumentative and dumb. He's not even sensitive, willing to care temporarily for his 11-year-old son by an ex-girlfriend who has just died only in exchange for cash. Abusive toward the kid, Charlie lucks out in that the great-looking blond boy, Max (Dakota Goyo), is a whiz with machinery, just the guy to help bring a robot to fighting trim.
Greeting Max's efforts at seeking love and approval with gruff rejection, Charlie scrapes up some low-end bouts, first with a bot that gets destroyed then with a makeshift old sparring robot named Atom that looks like it belongs on Tatooine. After a couple of amazing victories, the relatively slight machine with bright-red eyes acquires a following, and father and son eye a long-shot match against the undefeated Zeus, a towering black thing controlled by a filthy-rich Russian superfox (Olga Fonda) and a vain Japanese designer (Karl Yune).
It goes without saying that gruff Charlie eventually will succumb to his inner dad and embrace Max, but it's a big problem that Charlie is genuinely unlikable. Impatient, defensive and rude, he's thoroughly deficient in redeeming human qualities. Max is forced to tolerate him, but not for a moment is it credible that his comely former girlfriend Bailey (Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame) would still hang around her late dad's old Dallas gym, which she allows Charlie to use as a robot workshop, and welcome such a loser back into her life. Working hard to deliver the accent and externals of an American “street” character, Jackman doesn't provide Charlie with a glimmer of heart until the very end. It's easy to imagine, say, Mel Gibson of 15 years ago giving such a role just the right balance between jerk and hidden softie, but Jackman's Charlie comes off as almost entirely abrasive, someone you'd go out of your way to avoid.
Taking up the slack to an extent is young Goyo, recently seen in Thor, who is natural and unaffected in front of the camera and instantly winning.
Despite the preprogrammed feel of John Gatins' script (Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven get story credit, despite the foundation provided by Matheson's original), director Shawn Levy, in a change of pace from his usual comedies, makes sure the old Rocky underdog charge sets when the climactic bout gets under way. With the slim Atom looking like he has as much of a chance against Zeus as Pee-wee Herman would against the Rock, it's hard not to engage with the momentum as it swings wildly from one extreme to the other. Charlie, enacting outside the ropes the moves he wants Atom to make, summons all of his boxing knowledge to achieve something through this mechanical proxy that he never quite pulled off in the ring. The ending has the right feel of resolution, but it's still a question how much of a rooting interest audiences will take in robots trying to send one another to the junkyard.
Loaded with enough product placement to make Jerry Lewis proud, Real Steel is technically seamless.
our editor recommends
Guided by a large and august creative team seemingly dedicated to making a film without a speck of originality, this DreamWorks production for Disney is based on the 1956 short story “Steel” by Richard Matheson, who seven years later adapted it for an episode of The Twilight Zone. In it, Lee Marvin starred as a former boxer who, in a future world (1974) in which human boxing has been outlawed and replaced by android combatants, disguises himself as a robot to fight a mechanical opponent.
With Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks on board, the Transformers connection is felt heavily, even if the bots are neither so enormous nor numerous. In fact, the first ramshackle tin can of a fighter promoted by bottom-feeding hustler Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) isn't even strong enough to put up a fight against a live bull at a Western county fair in the film's opening action sequence.
As close to the gutter as Mickey Rourke was at his ebb in The Wrestler, Charlie is crude, argumentative and dumb. He's not even sensitive, willing to care temporarily for his 11-year-old son by an ex-girlfriend who has just died only in exchange for cash. Abusive toward the kid, Charlie lucks out in that the great-looking blond boy, Max (Dakota Goyo), is a whiz with machinery, just the guy to help bring a robot to fighting trim.
Greeting Max's efforts at seeking love and approval with gruff rejection, Charlie scrapes up some low-end bouts, first with a bot that gets destroyed then with a makeshift old sparring robot named Atom that looks like it belongs on Tatooine. After a couple of amazing victories, the relatively slight machine with bright-red eyes acquires a following, and father and son eye a long-shot match against the undefeated Zeus, a towering black thing controlled by a filthy-rich Russian superfox (Olga Fonda) and a vain Japanese designer (Karl Yune).
It goes without saying that gruff Charlie eventually will succumb to his inner dad and embrace Max, but it's a big problem that Charlie is genuinely unlikable. Impatient, defensive and rude, he's thoroughly deficient in redeeming human qualities. Max is forced to tolerate him, but not for a moment is it credible that his comely former girlfriend Bailey (Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame) would still hang around her late dad's old Dallas gym, which she allows Charlie to use as a robot workshop, and welcome such a loser back into her life. Working hard to deliver the accent and externals of an American “street” character, Jackman doesn't provide Charlie with a glimmer of heart until the very end. It's easy to imagine, say, Mel Gibson of 15 years ago giving such a role just the right balance between jerk and hidden softie, but Jackman's Charlie comes off as almost entirely abrasive, someone you'd go out of your way to avoid.
Taking up the slack to an extent is young Goyo, recently seen in Thor, who is natural and unaffected in front of the camera and instantly winning.
Despite the preprogrammed feel of John Gatins' script (Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven get story credit, despite the foundation provided by Matheson's original), director Shawn Levy, in a change of pace from his usual comedies, makes sure the old Rocky underdog charge sets when the climactic bout gets under way. With the slim Atom looking like he has as much of a chance against Zeus as Pee-wee Herman would against the Rock, it's hard not to engage with the momentum as it swings wildly from one extreme to the other. Charlie, enacting outside the ropes the moves he wants Atom to make, summons all of his boxing knowledge to achieve something through this mechanical proxy that he never quite pulled off in the ring. The ending has the right feel of resolution, but it's still a question how much of a rooting interest audiences will take in robots trying to send one another to the junkyard.
Loaded with enough product placement to make Jerry Lewis proud, Real Steel is technically seamless.
The Bottom Line
This story of a washed-up boxer's redemption through robot boxing is made of nothing but recycled parts.
Goyo plays 11-year-old Max, a Dr. Pepper-chugging, videogame-obsessed urchin who shows up at the breaking point in the career of his estranged father, onetime heavyweight contender Charlie Kenton (Jackman). While Jackman is clearly the bigger star, "Real Steel" so deeply identifies with Max's point of view, there can be no question the pic was engineered to appeal to younger auds.
Although online reactions have mistaken "Real Steel" as a live-action version of the Rock'em Sock'em Robots game, pic's actual inspiration was Richard Matheson's hardscrabble short story "Steel," previously adapted as an episode of "The Twilight Zone." The addition of the kid character is just one of many departures in an approach that borrows the robot-boxing concept but little else from its pulp source material.
Consistent with director Shawn Levy's "Night at the Museum" series, "Real Steel" exploits the tension between a deadbeat dad and his estranged son, serving up some serious wish fulfillment on the way to reconciliation between the generations. John Gatins' screenplay (with story credit going to Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven) is almost merciless in its presentation of the flawed father figure: Jackman plays an alarmingly selfish con man who owes his creditors nearly $100,000 and who sells custody of his son for the same sum.
After Charlie sees his last robot reduced to scrap metal during a rodeo run-in with a bull, the empty-handed opportunist shows up in court to sign away Max to his aunt (Hope Davis) and her filthy-rich husband (James Rebhorn). Since the kid's guardians-to-be have a fancy trip planned, Charlie reluctantly agrees t
o take care of Max for a month or so -- just enough time for a change of heart to occur.
Like a 21st-century Bogart (with considerably better physique and teeth), Jackman has mastered the art of affable surliness. Goyo holds his own against the star, though Levy uses the adorable young man more for cheek-pinching appeal than to create a well-rounded character. While widescreen lensing allows for more visual audacity than his previous features, TV-trained Levy loves closeups -- a tactic that plays better on homevideo than Imax screens -- and Goyo's the kind of dewy-eyed child actor on whom he can rely for emotional cutaways.
As it happens, "Real Steel's" most endearing character isn't human at all, but an obsolete second-generation robot named Atom. With neon-blue eyes glowing behind what looks like a mesh fencing mask, Atom appears to be more alive than the gleaming, cutting-edge counterparts he faces in the ring. "Don't worry, your secret's safe with me," Max tells him, though pic leaves it alluringly open-ended what that "secret" might be -- just as it allows for the possibility that Charlie may not be Max's actual father.
Far less ambiguous is the analogy between Atom's origins (after Dad destroys two expensive fighting bots, Max digs the battered droid out of the mud in a dangerous landfill raid) and the scrappy status of his two trainers. Charlie has all but discarded his young charge, and he's not far from being tossed out of the small-time circuit himself. Still, something about this soulful robot -- who takes a beating but refuses to stay down -- inspires them to challenge the champ of the World Robot Boxing League, an autonomous, constantly evolving pile driver named Zeus.'
Such attention to character makes it easy to understand why the story would connect with young auds. The uncanny thing about "Real Steel" is just how gripping the fight scenes are; Sugar Ray Leonard served as a consultant to the motion-capture performers responsible for pantomiming the machines' moves. Atom is unique in that he features a "shadow mode," further anthropomorphizing the character as the bot learns to mimic the moves of its trainer.
As future-set stories go, the pic doesn't alter much about the present. Instead, Levy celebrates the truck-driving, can-do spirit of the heartland, adapting exec producer Steven Spielberg's all-American attitude to a more blue-collar crowd. Seamless visual effects and heavy-duty sound design complete the illusion of fast-moving fighting machines, while Danny Elfman's inspirational score leaves no heartstring unstrummed.
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