"It's a burrito!"

Real Steel   11/12/12

Director: Shawn Levy              Writer: John Gatins

2011

           

            As a film with its roots in a Richard Matheson short story, many parallels to Rocky (1976) and a $110, 000, 000 budget, this film has lots of potential to live up to. It is also a film aimed at kids from around 7-13 so as a critic one must let a few bad lines of dialogue and an awkward plot point slide now and again. Plus it has Wolverine, it must be good right?

            Well I will start with the good points. This is a film with giant fighting robots and so jumps on to the back of the Transformers (2007) bandwagon (that presumably turns in to a robot itself) but for me that is not necessarily a good thing. However in this case I am proven wrong, CGI fight scenes with giant robots can have some semblance of realism, it is possible for me to follow what is happening during the fight and know which robot is a good guy and which is not. In this point if nothing else Michael Bay could learn from director Shawn Levy. Also the robots are fancy enough that they are interesting and simple enough to comprehend.

            Another good point is that, while to begin with I thought the writers were trying to portray Hugh Jackman as an all American tortured soul who is an alcoholic because he wakes up with two empty bottles of Budweiser on the floor, they went for a less clichéd route of making him a money loving morally bankrupt egotist who shows no emotion when he finds out that the mother of his child is dead, and is happy to sell off the custody of the child. I genuinely wondered how they could redeem him. On top of this, the film looks really great, the soundtrack is pretty reasonable and I can see how kids could get sucked in to this film, especially by the first robotic fight in a cool car factory.

            Alas there are bad points slapped right alongside the good. The film looks great, but the editing is stagnant and arbitrary, failing to build pace when it needs to yet happily cutting four or five times for no reason from a mid shot to a crowd shot. I am probably being picky, but it took me out of the scene where Jackman’s original robot is about to fight a bull (which seemed unfair on the animal) and he is too busy looking at a pretty blonde lady to avoid having his robot made in to scrap by the bull’s horns. So now he is even further in debt (for a man at least 50k in debt he has a fancy phone) and has no robot...enter his dead girlfriend and his son, whom he is willing to sign over to the child’s Aunt for a tidy 100k, but for whatever reason he has to look after the kid for a few weeks first. Half the money up front buys him a pretty awesome robot, who gets decapitated in a good scene, again due to Jackman’s ego. At this point I was wondering why we should support him at all; I want a film about the Mr. T looking robot instead.

           

            Like any responsible adult Mr. Jackman brings the kid along to break in to a scrap yard hoping to build a new ‘bot. This is one of the scenes where we are spoon fed the back-story of characters and this roboty world, but in case this gets too boring the writers chuck the kid off a cliff. Long story short, they find an old robot and start fighting, and winning. We get a montage and scenes where Jackman and kid bond, which is all well and good. Eventually they get a shot at a league bout, at which point the ‘villains’ are introduced. The enemy composes of Zeus (best robot fighter ever), his builder Tak Mashido (enigmatic and confident and Asian) and the manager Farra Lemkova (all...well...sexy and Russian I suppose). Apart from them being quite up their own arses, which I would be if I had the best robot fighter ever at my disposal, I never understand why we are supposed to dislike them. Then again it is an underdog story, even though said underdogs are a seemingly heartless egomaniac and a bratty kid who doesn’t like hamburgers (WTF) and grabs the mike off the announcer after winning one league fight to ask for a title challenge.

            If I sound like I am not interested, that’s because I wasn’t. Despite what I said about letting things slide I could not take how plot points are clumsily walked through one at a time, how characters will change their entire outlook based on one event, and the emotional crux of the film (Jackman giving the child to the Aunt) is made to be unspeakably lame. If there was more emotional depth and a little more happening in the plot the film would improve dramatically. For example, the love interest for Jackman comes in the form of Evangeline Lily. This woman is not a bad actress and is beautiful; she should be able to add something to the film. However she is reduced to the tough but lovely girl stereotype present in many action films, she is feisty at first to get our respect, but when a child comes along her whole outlook reverses.  All of her emotionality is coming from one source (her dead father) penned in for that sole reason, and apart from that, which is never explored, she is just there to prop up the other actors. I didn’t even notice when she and Jackman went from having an antagonistic back story to being back in love.

            I wanted to like the film, but it got dragged down by it becoming just about the kid and the robot, and about scooping together everything that children that age like (robots, fighting, video games and rap music apparently) and putting it on camera in a flashy enough way to keep their attention. I wanted to know about how actual boxers feel when they are taking massive amounts of damage in the name of making money for the manager and entertaining children, maybe the robot could have been sentient? Maybe all the robots could rise up and destroy the statue of liberty? I would watch that.