Review: Real Steel

daniel cohen reviews the rock ’em sock ’em robot boxing movie …

Plot: Set in the near future where robot boxing has taken over traditional Boxing. When a washed-up former boxer and robot fighting manager Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is re-united with his estranged son (Dakota Goyo), they discover an old sparring bot in a junkyard. His unique programming allows him to utilize old style boxing mechanics as he moves up the ranks.

With a few tweaks and a cast change, Real Steel could have been … real good. Well, that pun may have sucked, but this movie does not. It’s actually pretty solid. There are a lot of fun elements, but unfortunately it suffers from a plethora of nagging issues, keeping it from reaching the levels it’s capable of.

One of those issues though is not Hugh Jackman. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad Hugh Jackman performance. He’s been in some not so good movies, but he elevates the material every time. He’s a complete asshole in this film, but dammit, he’s just so charismatic, you don’t even care that he uses his kid who he hasn’t seen in years and who just lost his mom as an opportunity to make some cash. Jackman is funny when he needs to be, but he also plays the ‘washed up’ persona just as well: a perfect performance.

Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame is also solid. She matches Jackman’s charisma, and you totally buy their chemistry. Her character (Bailey Tallet) is in a tough position. She wants to keep the business her father left her up and running, but she also cares deeply for Charlie who is hurting that business. Lilly conveys this confusion and turmoil very well, both solo, and in her scenes with Jackman.

Unfortunately, the entire movie is almost ruined by the performance of one Dakota Goyo, the kid who plays Charlie’s son Max. I hate to pick on kid actors, but he is terrible … like Jake Lloyd/Phantom Menace-level bad. My annoyance meter broke when watching his scenes. When he has to be whiny, he’s overly whiny. When he has to be tough and arrogant, he overplays it 10 times over. And the problem is that he’s practically in every scene. You rarely catch a break. He also brings down all the other performances. Whenever Evangeline Lilly has a scene with this kid, she’s terrible. But when she’s on her own or with Jackman, she’s great. What does that tell you? This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Dakota Goyo. He was also the young Thor in Thor. And even though he was only in one scene, he was my least favorite performance in that film. So to sum up: I’m not joining a Dakota Goyo fan club anytime soon.

And the relationship between him and Charlie is a significant weakness. It’s not terrible, and you certainly feel for the bond they develop, but because of Goyo’s performance, it was hard to invest in it. Whenever there was a father/son centered scene, it slows up the pace significantly. The film is way too long because of it. If the father/son plot was written better, that would be one thing, but whenever the movie focuses on it, I was just like, ‘Can we get back to the robots?’

And let’s be honest: we’re here to see robots kick the shit out of each other. And boy, do we ever. First of all, I love the Robot Boxing culture that’s created for this story. It’s reported on just like boxing and MMA is covered on ESPN. It’s a legit sport. But they also trickle in these Rocky-like elements. And I don’t mean like the first couple Rocky movies, I’m talking about characters like Ivan Drago or Clubber Lang, these great over-the-top villains. Karl Yune plays Tak Mashido, this eccentric, but brilliant robot designer who feels and acts like a super villain, but it totally works in this world. He also has his James Bond female counterpart Ferra (Olga Fonda), a business-savvy bombshell who handles all of Tak’s wheeling’s and dealings. This is a really fun element to the film.

The highlight, though, is definitely the actual robot fights. They are awesome and filmed really well. It’s like they are actually choreographed. And unlike Michael Bay’s Transformer movies, it was nice to actually tell what was going on rather than a jumbled mess of metal thrown onto the screen. They introduce a cool method to how these robots move and react, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. And even though these robots are all controlled and built by humans, they still have personalities, especially Atom, the robot we spend the most time with. And what’s so intriguing is that he’s only mimicking the motions of Charlie and Max, yet there’s still a distinct personality about him.

The movie needed more of this, though, or it just needed to be shorter. We’ll see a cool fight, but then it goes back to the under written family drama. They also shoehorn in this villain (Kevin Durand) who Charlie owes money too. He randomly comes back at the end of the second act, and while what he does to Charlie and Max is harsh, I didn’t really see what the big deal was in the aftermath of this scene. But the movie totally changes its direction because of this. It completely comes out of no where, just lazy writing.

Despite a lot of clever moments (it’s in the future, so there’s an ad for X-Box 720), the dialogue is pretty poor. It’s so direct, completely spoon feeding the audience, telling them exactly what’s happening. Yeah, we aren’t stupid. We can figure out certain things for ourselves just by observing the movie. While the direction (Shawn Levy) is solid, the overall script needed to be a lot tighter.

Hugh Jackman and the robots make this worth checking out, but it’s a shame, because with a few changes in the script stage, it could have been a great family/sports pic. And let me just emphasis this one last time: Dakota Goyo is really bad.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10 (Slightly better than ‘meh’)