Real Steel

Real Steel, directed by Shawn Levy, was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar, and that's a deserving honor. The rest of the film, though, is an amiable but not very original tale that will be familiar to most sentient beings. It's a lot of Rocky, The Champ, and a bit of The Iron Giant.

In the near future, human boxing has been replaced by battling robots. As explained by the star, Hugh Jackman, it's because people lusted after the violence that humans couldn't provide. This strikes me as a dubious premise, given that mixed martial arts seems to have done just the trick.

In any event, Jackman plays a roguish character who used to be a boxer, but now operates boxing robots. He is highly irresponsible, heavily in debt and impetuous to the point of us wondering how he even manages to make it through the day alive. After his robot is destroyed at a state fair, where he also loses a $20,000 bet, he's told that his ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him custody of an 11-year-old son who he seems to have never seen.

That boy, Dakota Goyo, has been staying with a rich aunt and uncle. Jackman, sniffing cash, agrees to let the uncle have custody for a large cash settlement, but first will take the boy on for the summer. Goyo, who sees through Jackman immediately, is disgusted, but the kid loves robot boxing, and along with Jackman's buddy, Evangeline Lilly, gets involved when Jackman buys a new robot.

Eventually Goyo, while on a raid of a junkyard, finds an old robot, one that is obsolete and used for sparring. Somehow, and this is not completely explained to my satisfaction, the robot, "Atom," understands what Goyo is telling him. This, and a component called "shadow response," in which the robot can mimic it's controller's physical actions, allows him to get a chance at the championship, against a much larger, much more technologically advanced robot called Zeus.

All of the boxing film cliches are here, mostly from Rocky and The Champ, as the father and son grow to love each other, brought together by a hunk of metal. Though it's entirely predictable and doesn't aim very high, it therefore doesn't have far to fall, and I didn't hate it. Jackman is a good screen presence, and though Goyo can be annoying, he didn't ruin the film for me.

The special effects are terrific--at no time did I question that these were really robots fighting, when I'm sure they were all digitally created and the actors were performing in front of green screens. There already are robots designed to fight each other--the BattleBots. I don't think the technology for these things is that far away. If they can replace the savage spectacle of two people put in a ring pummeling each other until one is knocked out, I'm all for it.