Real Steel movie review & film summary (2011)
The movie's story, however, is not from the future but from the past, cobbling together Rocky's rags-to-riches trajectory and countless movies in which estranged fathers and sons find themselves forced together and end up forging a deep bond. Hugh Jackman stars as Charlie Kenton, a former boxer who is now hanging onto the fringes of the fight game as the owner-operator of a ramshackle robot he tours with. It's no match for the competition, and when the desperate Charlie replaces it with another battered veteran, it can't even outfight a real bull.
Even during these early fight scenes, however, it's clear than the movements of the robots are superbly choreographed. My complaint about the battling Transformers of the movies series is that they resemble incomprehensible piles of auto parts thrown at each other. Fast cutting is used to disguise the lack of spatial continuity. "Real Steel," however, slows down the fight action enough so that we can actually perceive it, and the boxing makes sense.
OK, OK, it doesn't completely make sense, because when one of these behemoths slugs the other with a right cross to the jaw, we're wondering (1) shouldn't one of those punches cause as much damage as a car wreck, and (2) why do robots have jaws? For that matter, why are they humanoid at all? "Real Steel" doesn't pause for logical explanations. In this world, robots do the work that human boxers used to do. (Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant on the fight scenes.) The director is Shawn Levy, who didn't endear himself to me with the "Night at the Museum" movies, but gets on base with this one.
If the movie were all robot fights it might be as unbearable as — well, a Transformers title. Drama enters in the person of Charlie's son, Max Kenton (Dakota Goyo), a smart, resilient pre-teen who, like all kids, seems to have been genetically programmed to understand computers, video games and all allied fields. Charlie is a very bad absent father, and as played by Hugh Jackman, he is actually mean toward his boy. Charlie's sister (Hope Davis) and her husband (James Rebhorn) plan to adopt the boy, but in a complicated arrangement, Charlie first has to take care of Max for a summer.
