“Real Steel”… Giant Robots

Most of today’s mainstream movies are brewed in crucibles of cliché, stirred by the hands of anxious amateurs, which is why they materialise as Frankensteinian monsters – wobbly, lumbering creations visibly stitched together from used parts. But when the pot is stirred by a crafty alchemist, these clichés can fuse into… if not exactly gold, then at least fool’s gold, inherently worthless but appeasing in appearance. For the second time this year, after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I walked into a theatre prepared for a few harrowing hours ahead. Boxing robots in a father-son melodrama? How can any good come of this? And for the second time, I walked out with a smile. Real Steel is a sweetly old-fashioned audience pleaser that practically dares you not to like it. You’ve seen the underdog boxer routine in Rocky, the down-on-his-luck father learning to exist with a distant son in Kramer vs. Kramer, a lad forming a psychic bond with a strangely sentient creature in E.T. – but it all comes together as rousing proof that these clichés became clichés for a reason. They work. The only issue with Shawn Levy’s should-be smash is the unexciting title, which sounds like an advertisement for kitchen knives. Here’s an alternative: Formula Won.

Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman, in his by-now patented part of a sensitive soul buried beneath a rocky surface) is a former boxer who makes a disreputable living by entering robots as contestants in boxing tournaments. He then discovers that a long-ago girlfriend has passed away, leaving behind an eleven-year-old named Max (the winning Dakota Goyo). Max is his father’s son in many ways, not least in this twinkling thing he does with his eyes that makes it impossible to refuse him – but he’s also a whiz with robots. When Charlie paces about in frustration that an expensive new robot outfitted like a samurai and anachronistically named Noisy Boy doesn’t recognise his voice commands, Max seizes the headset and speaks to it in Japanese. It works. A stunned Charlie demands, “How the hell do you know Japanese?” Max replies, “Video games.” The kid is, in computer-era parlance, a chip off the old block. An uneasy truce is established, and the story very predictably charts a course towards the redemption of Charlie, both as fighter and father.

Real Steel succeeds because it is neither an ear-shattering Transformers-like vision of the apocalypse, where humans are required simply to cower at the corners of the frame, nor is it a schmaltzy against-all-odds saga. It divides time evenly between droids and drama – though its sympathies lie with the former. Charlie’s love interest (Evangeline Lilly) is the perfunctory feminine presence, a silent cheerleader storing news clippings about his glorious past in hidden-away shoeboxes. The robots are more human. When Noisy Boy is slain in the ring and falls to the floor, oil leaks from its head into a puddle that resembles a pool of blood. An earlier robot, tossed into an arena with a bull, imitates the animal’s actions, shaking its head and scraping its giant feet on the ground like a matador. Decades ago, when George Lucas imagined C-3PO as an epicene fussbudget, robots were our slaves and we laughed at them. The climactic showdown in Real Steel occurs between a robot that Max puts together and a destructive, green-eyed behemoth – they are named, respectively, Atom and Zeus. From the infinitesimal to the infinite, from A to Z, the future is clearly theirs.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: English