At risk of disappointing or – worse – vindicating many of my readers (although the term ‘many’ may be unwarranted except in the trollian sense of “one, two, three, many, lots“), I have to say this was a fantastic movie, and it’s not just because Hugh Jackman kicks arse and kicks arse, having already taken all the names he needed to take as Wolverine, giving him ample time in this movie to do what he does best, because frankly his name-taking was slapdash at best, probably because of those claws and being Canadian.
Now, I don’t give a crap about fight movies, or indeed any sort of sporting contest movie, particularly boxing, wrestling, kick-boxing or anything like that. The last sport movie I cared about was Cool Runnings. Unless Cars counts as a sport movie, that was some heartwarming $hit right there.
Nor do I care about struggling-deadbeat-possibly-addicted-to-something-has-been-dad-makes-peace-with-estranged-kid-and-becomes-a-good-father movies. And Real Steel was a struggling-deadbeat-possibly-addicted-to-something-has-been-dad-makes-peace-with-estranged-kid-and-becomes-a-good-father movie, where the dad is also a washed-up boxer and they go on to do a rising-underdog Rocky-style boxing story. So, double loser.
The difference here, and I admit it’s a petty and subtle one to make such a big difference to my movie-going experience, is that this movie had robots.
Most of you will know this movie was based on that weird trigger-operated game which I think is called “Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots”, where the players each have a little toy robot and they just basically punch each other’s heads off. My thought, walking into the cinema, was “how can they possibly make a movie of this?”. Walking out of the cinema, my thought was “how can they possibly NOT have made a movie of this?”
Yeah, so it was brilliant. A Rocky movie with strong overtones of Futurama‘s Robot Wrestling League. I was actually a bit disappointed when they said “hailing from parts unknown,” they didn’t amend it to “hailing from, and made of, parts unknown.” But there were plenty of references to keep people happy here. Even the robots had moves similar to the game.
And they were pretty great robots. I think they were animatronic at least in places, rather than CGI, and it makes a huge difference. CGI’s just not that good yet. That made the whole thing worth watching. And the human actors did a pretty good job too. The kid wasn’t annoying hardly at all, and Hugh Jackman was his usual lovable arsehole throughout, finally mending his ways and making up for it all, although that probably wasn’t the best way to end things for the various people who had been enabling his addictive personality traits all these years. And speaking of them, Kate from Lost did an okay job too.
But the real heroes here were the robots. Atom and Zeus, Twin Cities and Ambush, Noisy Boy and all the others. Real Steel? Pure gold, more like it. I was fairly sure it was going to have a ridiculously happy ending, but even that managed to be a bit clever. And I had sweaty palms with excitement when the arse-kickings began. Awesome.
Go see this film. Don’t listen to the critics, they’re retards.
