In a not too distant future, robots have replaced humans in the boxing ring. For these impending incarnations of ourselves, the battering of skin and bone has become a little too mundane, apparently. Instead, a form of fantasy boxing has emerged, indulging far more elaborate fancies of large-scale destruction as mindless entertainment.
Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a former pugilist who never quite reached his full potential; his determination and courage were never questioned but a lack of strategy and logic under pressure seems to have been his greatest shortcoming.
He longs to gain entry to the lucrative world of big-time robot boxing, where naturally, he can live out his unfulfilled dreams through a different medium. But now the son, 11 year old Max (Dakota Goyo), he abandoned at birth re-enters the frame when the boy’s mother dies suddenly. Charlie has a couple of months of unwanted parenting to contend with before he completes a financial ‘transaction’ with the boy’s rich aunt and uncle (Hope Davis and James Rebhorn).
This interim period may be torturous enough for Charlie, but then Max throws a spanner in the works. The boy unwittingly uncovers the carcass of an old robot as they go foraging for rusty parts in a steel graveyard and dreams of entering the fray of competition with an outmoded model named Atom.
There’s little surprise value about Shawn Levy’s latest film. It’s a jazzed-up theme park ride that sees metal excitingly flayed without the possibility of blood being spilt or a single profane utterance entering earshot. In short, Real Steel follows a simplistic, very well-worn narrative path, but few films have travelled this road in such an entertaining fashion.
I have to admit it: even being led by the nose to the finishing line, I was willing to lap the spectacle up and momentarily toss aside all critical faculties. The film delivers a knock-out blow of the most fundamental kind, unashamedly appealing to our base emotions. The polished screenplay is the work of John Gatins (fleshing out an idea by Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven, who in turn were adapting an old Richard Matheson short story) but ultimately it’s the performances that lift the trite emotions off the page and make us feel a resonance in the final stages.
Hugh Jackman is as reliable as any Hollywood star these days; he’s rarely miscast and is the perfect physical specimen (or so the odd female has mentioned) to make mincemeat out of a role like this. Young Goyo is that rare example of a Hollywood muppet whose face you don’t want to immediately slap, despite what is usually an annoyingly extroverted nature once he finds his voice. Evangeline Lilly imbues a thankless minor role as Charlie’s long-time unrequited love interest with a naturalness and believability uncommon in commercial fare of these proportions.
As for the various robotic combatants, they’re by turns brutal, mildly scary, funny, intelligent, cunning and brilliantly designed especially so in the case of the two-headed beast, ‘Twin Towers’ (the work of a Tasmanian designer perhaps, based upon members of his family?). Danny Elfman’s score is mostly buried amid source music for a long period but is allowed, finally, to rise to the fore and add stirring, triumphant support to the final scenes.
Real Steel (2011) is a film for the family and for the 12 year old boy inside of every man itching to see the light of day again, it’s also an effective mass-market tool that’s guaranteed to reach its target audience via strong word of mouth.
I say:
An undeniably entertaining juiced-up shot of futuristic fancy that will have broad appeal for those looking for two hours of glossy, streamlined entertainment, nothing more.
See it for:
The fighting robots of course. They’re robots and they fight.
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