Real Steel: Written by John Gantis, Directed by Shawn Levy
Description: A gritty, white-knuckle, action ride set in the near-future where the sport of boxing has gone high-tech, Real Steel stars Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton, a washed-up fighter who lost his chance at a title when 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robots took over the ring. Now nothing but a small-time promoter, Charlie earns just enough money piecing together low-end bots from scrap metal to get from one underground boxing venue to the next. When Charlie hits rock bottom, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) to build and train a championship contender. As the stakes in the brutal, no-holds-barred arena are raised, Charlie and Max, against all odds, get one last shot at a comeback.
This review is based on a theatrical viewing I paid for myself
Lady-T’s review:
Put aside for a moment the fact that the concept is kind of like a dramatised version of an episode of Robot Wars, the problem with Real Steel is not that it’s bad, because it isn’t. It’s just that it’s not particularly good either.
But, and here’s the real crux of the matter… it’s sort of weirdly entertaining regardless.
I’ll be frank; I didn’t love it. It rather falls into that void of “Eh” in which I found myself not overly caring much about it either way. Which considering that Hugh Jackman and I have enjoyed a decade-long cinematic romance kind of hurts me to say, but there it is. Oh, sure, it’s amiable enough, and cheesy (Lord, is it ever cheesy) but it rolls along at a decent pace and even the most cynical of my viewing partners left the screening with a smile on their face.
Alright, they were probably smiling for all the wrong reasons (it was a bemused, slightly mocking smile, these are not people who enjoy morally uplifting plot-points on their own merit,) but the general audience seemed pretty happy and for round these parts that’s substantially better than other movies have fared. There’s nothing particularly special about Real Steel, but if you enjoy shiny robots beating into other shiny robots, served up along side a father-son redemption plot, all whisked in with some underdog Vs corporate greed and boomy loud rock music… well, it’ll help while away a wet Wednesday in a pleasant sort of manner.
More honestly, however, the whole thing really just felt… lazy.
I know, given the genre, the sporting underdog, you don’t expect a whole lot of originality. But with Real Steel you can pretty much count the beats –They’re in there between all the product placement– and I defy you to find any point at which you don’t know exactly what’s coming. Perhaps with the exception of a couple of facepalm-inducingly twee dance routines which were, coincidentally, the point at which my companions all agreed there is absolutely no way you can take any of this film even remotely seriously.
The only person who really fares well out of this bizarre genre soup is Dakota Goyo (playing Max) in one of those rare child-actor performances that remains mercifully free of the whiff of precocious stage-school brat. Hugh Jackman on the other hand, just needed a couple of slices of bread around him and he would have made a pretty substantial ham and cheese sandwich all on his own.
The extent of his contribution seems limited to propping up some scenery while phoning in the rest of his performance. It would not be a lie to say I was more disappointed by this peculiarly disengaged by-the-numbers appearance than by any particular weakness in the script. It is, shall we say, not his best work. In playing the charming-but-unreliable-jerk there’s not much here that you haven’t seen him do before in other, earlier films. His character of Charlie is almost awkwardly reminiscent of hacker Stanley Jobson in the action-thriller Swordfish, maybe with a little hint of Wolverine thrown on top for good measure. Holding it up against his performance in films like The Prestige or The Fountain, it feels like a regressive step backwards.
It has all the Jackman shorthand acting tics, up to and including the constipated turtle face that stands in for deep emotion when nothing more involved is forthcoming. This is, perhaps, what makes it so very frustrating for me when the rest of the audience seemed to quite happily enjoy themselves. I didn’t expect too much of Real Steel, it kind of is what it is, and I got exactly what I anticipated. It’s reasonably entertaining and ultimately disposable. The most disappointing thing is that almost everyone involved should have been capable of better.
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Lady T
Lady T is a great lover of British TV, which is helpful as that's mostly what she gets to watch. She strongly believes that tea can't be made using a microwave, that children's programming really was better when she was a kid, and that there's nothing in the world that can't be solved with a liberal application of common sense. She very much enjoys reading but like most of the rest of the world would some day like to write a book herself. If she ever succeeds in doing so there's a pretty good chance she'll never shut up about it. She can be contacted at lady_t_220 @ yahoo.co.uk.
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