Review of Real Steel (2011) by Halfwelshman — 21 Jul 2012

I was pleasantly surprised at Real Steel. I was expecting a Rocky carbon copy at best, and another Transformers instalment at worst. Yes, it does owe a lot to earlier boxing movies, the Rocky series in particular, from which it "borrows" entire story arcs, but it still manages to present enough new ideas to leave its own mark.

At its very heart, Real Steel is a very human story about an estranged father and son growing to love each other through a shared passion, and through shared struggles. The film also has exhilarating action, interesting visuals which blend the futuristic with the retro, and an unexpected amount of decent laughs.

Hugh Jackman does what he does best - playing another gruff streetwise smart-ass hiding a kind heart, and Kevin Durand makes a good villain, a rich and brutal Deep South scumbag. Everyone in the cast is acted off the screen however by the young Dakota Goyo, who looks a bit like The Phantom Menace's Jake Lloyd but has bucket loads of attitude and considerably more talent.

Despite the film getting so many fundamentals right, you have to ask what the character of Evangeline Lilly's boxing club owner Bailey brings to film beyond bubbling romantic implications with Jackman's Charlie, you have to ask why the film needs to be over two hours long, and you also have to ask why Real Steel needs fighting robots at all.

My guess is that the decision was purely mercenary, as the story would have worked just as well as a contemporary tale about a damaged father-son relationship that is healed through their shared experience with boxing.

But hey, robots beating each other to rust is cool, and you really can't complain much when the resulting film is this fun.