Real Steel Review: It’s as much fun as you’ll have in the cinema this year, & that’s a “bet brother.”

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Where to start this review? I’ll start with the simple stuff. It’s a great piece of family entertainment. Characters to love and hate, action that’s top drawer, a kid that can actually act, Hugh Jackman at his crowd pleasing best and a story that everyone can get behind and enjoy.
(TheREALEverton loves REAL Steel? Hmmm that's look so good on a poster)

Real Steel: Sugar Ray Leonard talks Boxing choreography for the film

I considered starting by advising, asking, imploring people to put aside their preconceptions about this film. Despite being based on a 1957 story from respected Sci-Fi legend Richard Matheson (previously filmed as a Twilight Zone episode, also titled ‘Steel’) Real Steel has had a hard time finding respect because of its premise; which some see as outlandish. Personally I’m always open minded about such things, but I get that a lot of people see the world in a very straight way and find such shifts off centre harder to take seriously. There will be those who say this story is altered significantly from Matheson’s original short, but then The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man & I Am Legend are deviate (sometimes to massive degrees) from Matheson’s novel I Am Legend.

Synopsis...

“A gritty, white-knuckle, action ride set in the near-future where the sport of boxing has gone high-tech, Real Steel stars Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton, a washed-up fighter who lost his chance at a title when 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robots took over the ring. Now nothing but a small-time promoter, Charlie earns just enough money piecing together low-end bots from scrap metal to get from one underground boxing venue to the next. When Charlie hits rock bottom, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) to build and train a championship contender. As the stakes in the brutal, no-holds-barred arena are raised, Charlie and Max, against all odds, get one last shot at a comeback.”

So I’d ask; how is a future in which Vampirism is a scientific mutation, somehow more plausible and / or less outlandish than one where boxing has become too dangerous (It already is right?)  Not violent enough and people watch robots smash the crap out of each other instead? In practical terms we already have ‘Robot Wars’ and similar events / sows all over the world, but as yet I haven’t heard of any outbreaks of Vampirism.

Next on my list would be the number of Americans who seem to be obsessed with a game that I’m not sure anyone even knows about outside of that country, save for exposure to it in various films, ‘Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots’. The film has nothing to do with that game and frankly the obsession with treating the film as if it is some kind of ‘ ‘Battleship’ style movie of a boards game is getting tiresome, especially in countries where the game effectively doesn’t exist. You know what else the film is nothing like? Transformers. One more lazy, unimaginative comparison to Transformers and... Oh I’m sorry, there are Robots in this film ergo it is like Transformers right? Just like Fast 5 reminded everyone of Herbie Goes bananas? What? It didn’t? Fast cars; South America; theft... same film right? OK how about Twilight & Blade? OK so having a common element, even one as relatively rare as robots, doesn’t make for a the same or even a similar experience. The Transformers are life forms, alien ones at that, these are machines, manmade and completely without intelligence...(probably)

Battleship movie: Director explains why aliens are in the story and... it still kinda doesn’t make sense.(Some Spoilers)

This is by a distance Shawn Levy’s best film to date. Now that can be taken to mean a few different things. If you enjoyed the Night At The Museum films, Cheaper By The Dozen or The Pink Panther (2006) than you should enjoy this all the more as it is sharper, funnier and draws better performances from its 3 main characters than were required from the main protagonists of those films. If however, as critics tended to, you found those films wanting, then don’t let that put you off. This is in a whole different league and suggests that Levy, now firmly established as a ‘big time’ director is looking to do more than just put whatever script has come off the conveyor belt up on-screen  with technical merit but minimal imagination and little ‘heart’. 

The first right choice made here is casting Hugh Jackman in the lead. Despite the protestation of Dr. Cox, Jackman is an extremely likeable person and manages to get that across on-screen with deceptive ease. Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a character who is way past the last nerve of just about everybody he knows. He’s not nasty, or evil or even poorly intentioned, but he really isn’t very nice when it comes to pursuing his goals. Essentially he’s a functioning addict. He’s addicted to ‘making it’, to getting his fortune & Glory and with all or nothing attitude, plus the death of human boxing, keeping him from getting that as a boxer he travels the country trying to work his way up from just above the bottom of the robot boxing world. Leaving bad debts and broken friendships in his wake, Charlie goes from bad decision to worse decision and does nothing to endear himself to either the characters in the film or the audience. Well except that Jackman gives the character enough to show us how he has been able to survive as long as he has. He has that flash, that twinkle that says ‘just another chance’, when I make it you’ll see. You can see that there must have been a decent guy in there at some point and are willing to give the character a chance even though is decisions seem to get poorer & poorer; especially once he is reunited with the son he agreed to have nothing to  do with a decade earlier. Hell even his son is just another opportunity to try and further his career and “make some money!”

A lot of other actors in this role and you’d probably just be wishing he’d fail, or lose interest, Jackman sells this 100%.

Another good move appears to have been the decision to mix ‘real’ effects with state of the art CGI & motion capture. Just as you can see the benefit of mixing practical ‘men in suits’ wit CGI enhancements for the Frost Giants in Thor (Which tend to work far better than pretty much everything in the far more costly Green Lantern) Having life sized Animatronic robots and enhancing them, with CGI as well as having fully CGI models when needed makes all the difference here. Sure the Avatar / Rise of The Planet of The Apes level tech for the effects and the Mo-Cap makes for some truly Jaw Dropping visuals (Zeus’ entrance into the arena for the final bout made our audience’s jaws drop every bit as much as Charlie’s did in the movie) but it never looks anything but 100% convincing and there’s no uncomfortable moments when it seems like Robots & people or bulls) aren’t sharing the same space.

Adding to the film’s charm is an excellent performance from the young Thor, Dakota (Do all aspiring child actors need to be called Dakota?). Having done a very impressive job copying Chris Hemsworth Arrogant Thor performance, Goyo takes it a step further here; expertly portraying both a child who is deliberately aping his father (either as a way o winding him up or in attempts to actually follow in his footsteps); he also does an excellent job of simply behaving like Jackman’s Charlie Kenton, because he is so similar to him. It might not sound like much, but he’s not just playing his character, he’s playing his character as Jackman would play him if he were 11 years old. Better yet he never gets sickeningly cute, very easy in a movie as deliberately cliché ridden and ‘feel good’ as this one.

Real Steel; 2 minute video shows how to make a paper model of one of the movie’s robots...

With the greatest respect to Evangeline Lilly, who provides able support as the last person to put up with Charlie’s nonsense and his landlord, engineer and lover, the third main character in this film has to be the robot Atom. He’s a brilliant achievement, part Animatronic and part CGI (I challenge you to spot the difference) and invested with so much soul, despite a lack of speech, that you feel (as of course you are meant to) as much for him as the Kentons. Of all the groundwork that is laid for future tales in this universe (and there are many) the possibility that Atom may be the first robot to develop some kind of self awareness is the most interesting. He’s just a machine, just a big toy, like all of the other Robots in this film, but there is a sense, especially in a surreal scene involving Atom & his reflection, that there could be more to him.   

There’s a feeling that even if the film had lacked the high entertainment value that it has, Hugh Jackman would have dragged the audience through the film by sheer force of will. This is mirrored in the film’s final act when Charlie Kenton is ‘controlling’ Atom Xbox Kinect style, by actually performing the actions Atom needs to replicate in the ring. It’s a nice nod to the source material, wherein the main character (played by Lee Marvin in The Twilight Zone episode) is forced to disguise himself as his malfunctioning Robot and survive a round actually fighting a robot boxer.

'Steel' - Twilight Zone  episode

The film may follow a pretty standard underdog sports movie plot, wedded to a simple father & Son need to bond plot, but I’m reluctant to go any further into the details and spoil the journey. Much like Drive, although in a very different manner, this is a film that is on the face of it very, very simple: But it is the journey, the way that the simple, clichéd, stories are told that matters. Real Steel is just so full of energy and excitement and drama and perfect chemistry between the leads that it dares you not to have a good time despite yourself. It works on the Star Wars (as in ep IV) level of Sci-Fi fantasy. It’s an alternate universe and things are as they are. It isn’t interested in showing us how or why, and it doesn’t really matter. There’s robot boxing and most everything else is more or less the same. Robots probably aren’t used to rob banks, but then maybe they are; it isn’t relevant for the story, so it doesn’t get covered. Of course if they ‘Empire Strikes Back’ the sequel, expect plenty of more detail and depth on the world outside of robot boxing.

The preview audience I saw the film with loved it, almost to the last man & woman. It’s a crowd pleaser; is it manipulative? Sure. Does it have Oscar wining dialogue and Dickensian subtext? Hell no. Does it matter? Not at all. It’s good old fashioned cinema fun. I’d expect the next film (assuming of course this one earns enough money to get one, to be deeper, to explore this alternative reality future a little more, but I want it to as much of a good time as this film was. I’ve seen some great films this year, award winning great films. I’ve seen some really entertaining films too; but honestly, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed myself more at the cinema this year, and that goes for the people I took with me too. I got to see this film, early, for free, the biggest endorsement I can give it is to say I’m paying to see it again when it opens; and I’ll have a great time then too.

Movie-going / popcorn experience             - 10/10

Critical, film school view                             - 6/10

Overall score                                             - 8/10

(Release dates at the end)

Release dates...

Country	Date
Chile	6 October 2011
Hong Kong	6 October 2011
Hungary	6 October 2011
Singapore	6 October 2011
Canada	7 October 2011
Colombia	7 October 2011
Estonia	7 October 2011
India	7 October 2011
Lithuania	7 October 2011
Paraguay	7 October 2011
Russia	7 October 2011
Turkey	7 October 2011
USA	7 October 2011
Malaysia	13 October 2011
Poland	14 October 2011
UK	14 October 2011
France	19 October 2011
Thailand	20 October 2011
Germany	3 November 2011
Portugal	3 November 2011
Denmark	10 November 2011
Argentina	24 November 2011
Netherlands	24 November 2011
Italy	25 November 2011
Sweden	25 November 2011
Finland	2 December 2011
Spain	2 December 2011
Belgium	7 December 2011
Japan	9 December 2011