Real Steel
The important thing “Real Steel” does is, first and foremost, make me care about the father-son dynamic between Hugh Jackman’s Charlie Kenton and Dakota Goya’s Max. Charlie, a washed-up boxer who now fights robots and rakes up mounds of financial debt, walked out on Max’s mother shortly after Max was born. Now, the mother is dead, and before Max’s aunt and her husband take custody of him permanently, Charlie has a summer with the boy. Originally, Charlie’s motivations are solely financial (Max’s uncle is pretty well-off, and he basically “sells” his rights to custody for money), but over time, Charlie and the kid bond, and, well, you can probably figure out where things go from there.
The second thing “Real Steel” gets right is the robot boxing scenes. Created through a superb blend of on-set animatronics and CGI, the scenes of the robots in the ring have real weight as drama and spectacle; this isn’t just “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie” but the type of energetic, personally-driven action in sports movies past such as the “Rocky” movies (from which this film borrows liberally and, God help me, effectively). Much kudos not only to the effects teams that made these sequences come alive but also to director Shaun Levy, who’s made a career out of family-friendly fare such as “Cheaper by the Dozen,” “The Pink Panther,” and the two “Night at the Museum” flicks. Thankfully, Levy manages not to sand all of the rough edges off of this film’s story, and also shoots the robot boxing sequences with a lack of quick-cuts, allowing us to see the strategy, as it were, in these robot battles. (Something that hasn’t always been the case in Michael Bay’s “Transformers” films.) It’s a definite raising of the bar for the hitmaker, who strives for the same sense of fun and feeling his executive producer, some chap called Spielberg, has always thrived on over the years.
This movie left me cheering (on the inside, at least; I’m a grown man, for God’s sake), and more than a few times, had me in tears, especially when Charlie has to control Atom (the early-generation sparring ‘bot Max and he found in the junk yard, and has transformed into a winner) through a “shadowing” program in the climactic fight with the defending champion of the sport. The fight goes the distance, something the champ’s visionary creator and crass PR manager are less than excited about. It’s Rocky vs. Apollo Creed all over again, and it’s given even more weight when you see Charlie just outside the ring, summoning the champion he used to be for a son he never wanted, but now wants to make right with. Hell, I’m crying just writing about it. Who would have thought a “Rocky”-inspired futuristic boxing movie, also inspired by a short story from Richard Matheson (whose work gave Spielberg his first big, feature-length hit with 1971’s riveting “Duel”), would have what it takes to stand with the big boys in the genre, and still be standing when the final bell sounds?
