Movie Review - "Real Steel" (2011) **1/2

     As I have stated plenty of times in the past, boxing movies for whatever reason tend to resonate with me. I'm not sure why as I'm not a fan of the sport much at all. But so many movies based on the sport of boxing have been absolute classics, or at least watchable enjoyments. Real Steel falls into that second category easily. This is not a classic, but you can find worse ways to spend a couple hours of your life. It gets bogged down by too many cliches at times and it's easy to predict what is going to happen, but there is enough here that makes for decent rainy weather viewing.

     Real Steel stars Hugh Jackman as Charlie Kenton, a washed-up boxer who was once promising but his sport has evolved into battles between huge robots, rather than humans. This new sport allows spectators to see true fights-to-the-death which is obviously frowned upon amongst human fighters. Charlie is cocky, and a swindler, who owes money to several shady characters. This is not a nice man by any means. His world is complicated when he is informed that the mother of his 11-year old son has passed away, and Charlie is the next of kin. Charlie wants nothing to do with the boy, Max (Dakota Goyo), at first and the feeling from Max is mutual. When Max learns Charlie is involved in robot boxing however, he insits on coming along for the ride despite Charlie's protests to the contrary. Charlie invests in a new robot but his cockiness eventually leads to its destruction. Things are looking bleak for the father-son combo until Max stumbles upon a robot that has been left behind in a junkyard as scrap. Max senses something special about the bot, named Atom, and convinces Charlie to bring him along and help Max train Atom. Despite the initial skepticism, Charlie learns that Atom has a lot more to offer than initially believed, and all 3 members of the team get a final shot at a comeback.

     Real Steel will never be mistaken as a great movie but there is enough here to make it appealing to a lot of people and I give it a very mild recommend. Directed by Shawn Levy and written by Levy, John Gatins and Richard Mathis, the story is pretty predictable and as I said earlier, it falls into the routine of some standard cliches. That's not necessarily horrible, it just doesn't make for anything that could potentially surprise you. You've seen the outline of this story before, many times. Jackman does a decent job playing a very unlikable character early in this film. This was the one aspect of the story that really took me off guard, I didn't realize how much of a jerk the character Charlie is. I wasn't expecting that. But Jackman had decent chemistry with young Dakota Goyo and by the end of the movie, I was buying their relationship. The beautiful Evangeline Lilly (LOST) has a supporting role as a friend of Charlie's and she is always a pleasure to see on screen. If there was a long list of every film I have seen, Real Steel would fall directly in the middle somewhere. It's about as average as they come. Don't go out of your way to see it, but if you catch it on cable one day, give it a shot.