Movie Review: Real Steel
Last year there was a significant influx of major studio film productions in the area of Michigan which I call home – an exciting time then for us Midwesterners as everything from the third Harold and Kumar and Transformers flicks to George Clooney’s The Ides of March was setting up shop in and around the metro Detroit area. Being a film nut since I was a teenager, the allure of seeing a movie in production has always been a goal and so I finally saw it through and became an extra on the DreamWorks sci-fi drama Real Steel. It was educational to see first-hand the collaborative efforts of a crew and the tremendous number of camera set-ups a modern action spectacle full of cutting-edge special effects demands and how that painstaking work translates to the screen.
Based on a short work by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, A Stir of Echoes, a cocktail napkin he scribbled on that is likely in development as I write this) Real Steel takes Matheson’s basic premise of a near-future in which boxing robots have supplanted human pugilists (see the original telling in the Twilight Zone episode “Steel”) and imbues it with a well-meaning but overwrought father-son bonding drama – a conceit done with greater subtly and emotion in the old boxing chestnut The Champ.
A Steven Spielberg-Robert Zemeckis production handed over to the eager, populist director Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Date Night) is bound to hit all the right technical notes – which Real Steel does in spades thanks to the Avatar effects team – but Levy’s instincts to aim for the PG-13 midlands tarnishes what could have been a dystopian action treat in less family-friendly hands. As it stands, I’m not sure at which demographic Real Steel is aimed – some of it may be too dark for the kiddies while adults are bound to roll their eyes at some of the more egregiously pandering moments.
We begin with the always-affable (even when playing a louse) Hugh Jackman as former boxing great Charlie Kenton now reduced to making his bones by pitting his junkbot in an ill-fated match against a bull on the county fair circuit. Left penniless and on the run from angry fight promoters (led by hammy delight Kevin Durand), Charlie hightails it back to Texas where he meets his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) during a murky custody deal that promises Charlie $50,000 large if he gives up parental rights but watches over the kid while his guardians are away.
Flush with the cash, Charlie and Max begin to bond over remote-controlled fighting robots, eventually finding a junkyard scrapper called “Atom” that is almost cuddly enough to be made into a plush toy. The saccharine levels rise considerably once Real Steel becomes the story of a boy and his ‘bot – Atom has plaintive eyes and shares a synchronized dance with Max in the movie’s attempt to catch some of that E.T. magic. This is fine as childhood fantasy fulfillment, but Jackman is often sidelined in his own picture in favor of a grating, precocious child actor. Max’s dominance over the movie reaches an annoying apex when he jumps into a post-fight ring and lets out a lengthy diatribe on the owners of the champion ‘bot “Zeus.”
Hugh Jackman and Dakota Goyo in Real Steel. Photo by Film Frame – © DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Spoiling for a fight with Zeus, Max convinces Charlie that Atom can take the mecha-brute. If this were a traditional human boxing story, I might be more apt to forgive the hokey David vs. Goliath angle if there was at least the high stakes human injury that defines a good boxing drama – once the robots start pummeling each other you will be hard pressed to care about the physical toll on robots who are never given much personality (though it was a wise decision to keep them mute).
Add to the muddle an entirely superfluous romantic subplot Charlie shares with his mentor’s daughter and robot mechanic Bailey (Evangeline Lily) and Real Steel starts to feel like it is trying to be everything to everyone. I would have preferred less test-marketed hokum and more thoughtful consideration for why anyone would care about 9-foot robots pummeling one another to begin with.
Gregory Fichter
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