Review of Real Steel (2011) by Sleeper — 09 Oct 2011

"Real Steel" might be a success with 7 to 12 year old boys, who think that action without soul is cool. Robots get into the ring and duke it out forever. Special effects are nice. Unfortunately there is nothing interesting about these robots.

They are just chess pieces inside a single square. The players are outside the ring, but turn out not to be interesting at all. The queen of Lost is lost. "Wolverine" attempts to be "Han Solo", but fails to both shoot first, and even shoot at all.

There is a boy in this movie, someone kids can relate to, good with technology, able to remake a robot overnight in a trailer, add voice control and stuff like that. Normal kid. It could have worked if the story wasn't so overly sentimental.

I think every major character shed a tear close to the end. I did not. What "Real Steel" needed was some reality and some steel. Some kind of chaos would have been nice. Some conflict that you could believe.

Well, "Real Steel" didn't work for me, but due to impressive animation I'm willing to give the movie 3 out of 10. I saw potential in this movie. Like at a moment when a robot hugs a kid, what would have happened if the robot had by accident squeezed a bit too hard? I guess it wouldn't have been such a cute movie, but could have raised the stakes from zero to something, at least.

Maybe.