Shall I compare thee to something other than a robot boxing movie?
That’s really what the viewer must ask herself about Real Steel. Are we judging this film as a piece of art, alongside our literate dramas and clever comedies? Or are we judging it against what we would logically expect from a movie about robots of the future beating the bejesus out of each other — grading, in other words, on the kind of extravagantly generous curve previously known only to teachers marking up math tests the day after the local sports franchise wins a national championship?
Real Steel is not what you would call “good.” The dialogue is an unmusical clatter of cliches, the plot is predictable enough that you could use its straight lines to hang pictures, much of the acting is reminiscent of a Saturday Night Live parody, and you could carve more sharply defined characters out of an ice-cream cone with your tongue. It is an overstuffed Dagwood sandwich of a thing, piled to a teetering height with person-person fighting, robot-robot fighting, robot-animal fighting, a cute kid, a pretty girl, training montages, rural scenery, meanies with strong accents and an illicit fighting club called “The Zoo.”
Taking place in a not-too-distant future that’s neither utopian nor dystopian, but kind of semi-topian, Real Steel follows Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman), a former boxer who participates in the sport of robot fighting. (According to the Steel timeline, human boxers will get out of the game soon because they can’t hit hard enough to make audiences happy — so enjoy those humans pounding on each other while you still can.) In a world where there’s no more human boxing, Charlie is a charmer/degenerate/bum lugging around a scrappy bot who fights at state fairs. He’s not at the level of “league fights” — you know, the World Robot Boxing League, which is known, because it must be, as “the show.”
Through an unlikely sequence of events involving a conniving sidewinder, Charlie falls on hard times. Through an even more unlikely series of events, he takes possession of his long-lost 11-year-old son Max (Dakota Goyo) and starts lugging him around, too. There’s also an ex-girlfriend (Evangeline Lilly) who now runs a dusty old boxing gym, where her deceased father once mentored Charlie as a young fighter. (She’s trying to save this place, Charlie!)
