Real Steel

Based on a short story by Richard Matheson, Real Steel follows Hugh Jackman’s Charlie Kenton as he and his estranged son (Dakota Goyo’s Max) attempt to win a string of boxing matches with their oversized robot – with the film detailing both the various fights that ensue and the growing bond between Charlie and Max. There’s little doubt that Real Steel‘s biggest problem is its excessively deliberate pace and unreasonably overlong running time, as filmmaker Shawn Levy, working from John Gatins’ screenplay, has infused the movie with an incongruously epic sensibility that all-too-often threatens to negate its positive attributes – with the fairly pointless (and surprisingly unpleasant) robot-vs-bull brawl that opens the picture effectively setting a tone of regrettable sloppiness (ie Charlie goes through two robots before settling on his final fighter). From there, Real Steel emphasizes, to an almost interminable degree, the father/son relationship between Charlie and Max, with the ongoing emphasis on the pair’s hackneyed antics (eg Max, after being asked what he wants from Charlie, angrily responds, “I want you to fight for me! That’s all I ever wanted!”) wreaking havoc on the movie’s tenuous momentum to an increasingly pronounced degree. It’s clear, then, that the film benefits substantially from the inclusion of several unexpectedly engrossing robot-on-robot fight sequences, as such moments, which are, in the wake of Michael Bay’s disastrous Transformers trilogy, refreshingly coherent, generally compensate for the melodramatic silliness that’s been hard-wired into the narrative. By the time the undeniably exhilarating climactic bout rolls around, Real Steel has established itself as a frustratingly uneven (yet consistently watchable) piece of work that could have and should have been so much better.

*** out of ****