Boxing movies are about as American as Budweiser, apple pie, and hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat while drunkenly speeding down a residential road. Ever since Rocky gave America reprieve from the wave of cynical movies raining piss on this great nation of ours in the seventies, Hollywood has consistently made boxing movies for our enjoyment. Even when they suck, there’s something about seeing a plucky underdog take on the champ and either win the day, or lose for the right reasons. Seeing that little scrapper train his way from zero to hero has had audiences shadowboxing their way out of the theater and contracting diseases from consuming raw eggs for decades. Then, for some reason, Shawn Levy, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Don Murphy, decided that robots had to be involved this time. Now we have this thing called Real Steel.
Whenever one of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies came out, fanboys responded to haters (also known as “critics”) by saying that the Transformers movies are about robots hitting each other, which they erroneously argue is inherently awesome. Well, my easily amused friends, you’re in luck, because Real Steel is another movie involving robots hitting each other. Sure, it’s supposedly a story about a father and a son, but really, it’s not a story about a father and a son, so much as it is a story about a father and a child terror who might one day show up on a Cracked.com list of movie characters with undiagnosed mental illnesses.
Real Steel takes place in a world where boxing with people has been replaced with the obviously far more expensive boxing with robots for some reason. In the Richard Matheson story it’s based on (in theory, anyway), human boxing was deemed too-violent, and thus the PC police replaced it with robots. Here, it’s loosely explained that it happened because people wanted more violence…which doesn’t make much sense when two lifeless objects are pummeling each other, but whatever, just go with it.
Hugh Jackman stars as Charlie, a down and out deadbeat ex-boxer who carts his crappy robot to state fairs to fight bulls for chump change while dodging legitimately angry creditors. After a humiliating bout at a rodeo, Charlie is informed that an ex-girlfriend of his has died, and custody of the son they had out of wedlock, Max (Dakota Goyo) has been transferred to him. The boy’s aunt is keen to get custody, and sensing an opportunity to score some money, Charlie makes a deal with her wealthy husband to transfer custody for a payday. Part of the deal entails that he has to keep Max for a couple of months. It turns out Max is a big robo-boxing nut, and demands that Charlie let him come along to his fights. To make a long story short, Charlie and Max discover a unique robot in the scrap heap, and soon have the underdog winning matches left and right, getting it a title shot at the big time, all while some father-son bonding happens in the meantime.
Jackman is one of those leading men you can’t possibly stay mad at. No matter what he does, I’ll always adore the guy, even he’s cast in a crappy role in an even crappier movie (Van Helsing), or a great role in an awful movie (Wolverine). He could play Ted Bundy, and everyone would root for him to brutally murder as many co-eds as possible, because he’s such an inherently lovable fella. His character here, unfortunately, is a role with potential, but is ultimately poorly conceived and delivered on the page. Jackman is a likable actor cast in a deeply unlikable role that is inconsistent to boot, and Jackman trying to be unlikable comes off about as believably as Kevin Costner trying to speak with a British accent. Charlie is a brilliant robot-pilot-boxing-person-guy when the script needs him to be, and yet sometimes behaves like a complete amateur at the craft who makes unbelievably idiotic decisions in order to further the story whenever its appropriate, a classic case of Sloppy Storytelling 101.
The center of Real Steel’s story lies in the father-son relationship, which shows that the filmmakers were concerned with something greater than what Michael Bay was going for with the Transformers movies. The sad thing is, casting children in movies is a tricky business, and this is where one of the film’s biggest problems lies. Enduring Dakota Goyo’s performance as Max is no easy task, in that his young character behaves like an adult, and not in a realistic “oh, this child has Asperger’s” way, but in a “holy shit, these writers have no idea how to write characters that are actual kids” way. He’s an eleven-year-old who also seems to possess the inherent knowledge and skill of a master mechanic, negotiator, and Michael Jackson back-up dancer. He’s about as believable as a kid as John Wayne was as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. It’s not Dakota Goyo’s fault, so much as it is the screechy writing and hack direction he was given. You lost today, kid, but it doesn’t mean you have to like it.
Where Real Steel ultimately fails, though, is as an entire concept realized on film. Murphy and Spielberg have seen an ocean of cash from the Transformers franchise, and obviously they’re looking for some more rock-‘em, sock-‘em robots cash, but applying CGI creations to the boxing genre is a mistake. While seeing robots perform fisticuffs has a nice novelty, nothing beats the blood, sweat, and tears you experience in a good boxing movie with actual human beings slugging it out in the ring with a grand context behind it. Robots can’t replicate the feeling you get when it’s the tenth round and the underdog clearly would rather pass out on the canvas than do another bout of getting repeatedly punched in the face, but he trudges on anyway and takes one in the chin for his girlfriend wincing in the audience so they can embrace with dignity later. The movie hints that the robot that they dig up is somehow sentient, but they never explore or elaborate on it, making it come off as a cheap way to make us feel for what is otherwise a lifeless hunk of metal getting punched by another hunk of metal.
Real Steel isn’t an awful film, but it’s certainly not a good one. It’s nice to see a movie play with an established genre a little bit, but let’s stick to real people, shall we? And while we’re at it, let’s hire writers and a director who get how real people actually interact in a believable manner, instead of how people interact in movies where things happen because they say it should.
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