Real Steel takes
place in a time in the near future, a mere fourteen years from now, when boxing
will become a sport of the past. Because of an ever increasing audience demand
for carnage and destruction – the boxing equivalent of going to NASCAR for the
crashes – and because of leaps and bounds in the field of robotics, boxing will
be a sport for souped-up humanoid robots, controlled by their owners to beat
each other until sparks and oil splatter all over the ropes. This is miles from
Robot Wars a TV show from about a
decade ago that sent what were essentially Roombas with rotary saws crashing
into each other. The boxing of Real Steel
is boxing as we know it today with the same rules and the same rings, but the
athletes have gone the way of the factory worker. Instead of testing the limits
of the human body, robot boxing tests the limits of cold, hard steel. It’s a
wonder the crowds at these events aren’t wearing earplugs.
The film follows a down-on-his-luck, debt-burdened robot
manager (Hugh Jackman) who just can’t catch a break. In the opening scene, he
pulls up to a small town fair where he’s hoping to make a little money by
pitting his fighter against a bull and wagering a sizable sum with the event’s
promoters. Minutes later, his robot’s impaled by a horn and scattered across
the arena. The promoters expect him to pay up so he skips town. As he’s escaping,
he receives word that his old girlfriend has died, which leaves the eleven-year-old
son (Dakota Goyo) he’s never met in need of a guardian. Pulling up to the
courthouse, he convinces his ex’s sister (Hope Davis) to give him a few months
with his son, just for the summer.
This seems like two disparate plotlines, but they’re drawn
together when the boy shows a talent for helping his dad, and his dad’s
robo-gym landlord (Evangeline Lilly), work to get their robots in fighting
shape. (It’s explained away with an off-handed reference to video games, ‘cause
kids like those, right?) So the working-poor underdog, a former human pugilist
who has found his talent displaced and unexploited, struggling to make ends
meet and turn his life around, is encouraged by his son to try one last time to
make a go of robot boxing. It’s not too subtle, but I liked how the robots
become metaphors through which the father and son work out their individual
problems and eventually bond. But the old fighting robot has been rendered
unusable by a bull’s goring, so first they need to find a ‘bot. Then, they need
to get him to fight with the best of them.
It’s a testament to the power of clichés done right that the
film works so well. The two appealing performances from the leads ground the
proceedings in a nice, heightened Hollywood approximation of human emotion.
Jackman, with plenty of big star-power charisma, and Goyo, with engaging boyish
energy, play off each other well. The remarkable blend of practical and digital
effects works well for the robots. The believable blending between the worlds
of man and machine creates a reasonably credible, if more than a little silly,
sci-fi world for what is essentially a standard boxing movie.
The movie’s screenplay comes from John Gatins who has two
baseball movies, one basketball movie, and a horseracing movie to his credit.
He knows just the path to set the movie on and piles up the conflict in
the usual ways. The underestimated little robot the father-son duo finds, fixes,
and trains works his way up the ranks. They start in gritty underground matches
played against scary punks with no rules in roadside bars, dark clubs and
back-alley warehouses, before they fight their way into higher stakes and
bigger money. In solid sports movie fashion, the stakes grow as we charge
forward to the Big Fight with a popular, scary champion with boo-worthy
corporate backers. Each new match makes the widescreen spectacle all the more
eye-catching with massive crowds, large stadiums, and plenty of neon lighting
and pounding bass. It may be a bit predictable (when it comes to figuring out
where this goes, do you need a roadmap?) but it’s also enjoyable. I found the
matches just as, if not more, thrilling and involving as any of the fights in
last year’s Oscar-winning boxing movie The
Fighter.
The sci-fi specifics may be a little fuzzy, the characters
archetypes, and the plot a compilation of sports film’s greatest moments, but Real Steel is a big pleasing popcorn
movie. It’s loud and kind of dumb, but it’s also appealing, exciting, and more
or less satisfying. Director Shawn Levy, he of the Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink
Panther remakes and two Night at the
Museum movies, has stepped out of his (bad) family-comedy comfort zone to
make a comfortable big budget picture. With its warm father-son dynamic and
surprisingly convincing robot effects deployed for a sturdy formula adequately
told, the film has a pleasant feel. The look is glossy and confident. The pace
is brisk but deliberate yet exciting. It’s a fun entertainment machine, an
enjoyable couple of hours that tells a story through robots beating the living
steel out of each other for characters I cared about.
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