Rocky, but less robotic

Real Steel is a good movie.  There, I said it.  Everyone was initially turned off by the over-simplified premise, in that Hugh Jackman was going to be a trainer for robot boxers, or Rock-em Sock-em Robots THE MOVIE!  But really, instead of a modern underdog boxer story like Rocky, or a boxing story from the past like Cinderella Man, this is the same basic formula, but set in the future.  It’s not just about the boxing though, Hugh Jackman’s character, Charlie Kenton, has a son Max that he is taking care of who is played by Dakota Goyo, who may be the breakout star of this whole movie.  Charlie is basically the unsuccessful jerk of a father that Max never had, while Max is really the one that bring all the personality to this movie.

If you’ve seen an underdog boxing movie before--or really any kind of underdog story on the big screen--you could probably list out all the major plot points of this movie right now.  That doesn’t really take away from the movie though, because everyone loves this formula, even though there are rarely any wrinkles to it in any new movies that follow it.  Real Steel has some characters you really get invested in because you want them to succeed.  And it’s not because them succeeding makes the movie more exciting, it’s because it’s what the characters need.  Charlie is down on his luck and almost flat broke, and needs to win some fights to get back on his feet.  He’s also a delinquent father who doesn’t even want to be taking care of his kid, but due to forces outside his control he is stuck with him for the time being.  But as the move goes on, you want them to win, because you want them to stay together and be a real father and son.  Oh, and Evangeline Lilly is in this too as Bailey, Charlie’s landlord/friend/love interest, but really she could have been played by an old man and would have brought almost the same character to the story.

The only real wonky aspects to the story are the robots.  Gregg Easterbrook brought some of this up in his column Tuesday Morning Quarterback but it basically boils down to how quick these robots were developed, and how advanced they actual are.  Some of the controls seem way unbalanced compared to the others, whether it’s a futuristic video game controller, or voice control, or the “shadow-boxing” program that makes Atom so good, but the fact that we have all this technology in 10 years or so, and it’s commonplace?  That might be a bit of a jump.  But who are we to nitpick?

If you had told me going in that Real Steel was going to be a quality movie, I would have been pretty surprised.  I had a feeling I was going to enjoy watching it, and it would be the type of story you would want to cheer for, but that it was actually good-good?  That’s kind of surprising.  I highly recommend it if you like sports, or underdog stories, or robots, and if you like any combination of those things, you are really going to enjoy this movie.

John Hackert is a columnist and thinks Wolverine could've beaten a boxing robot.