Real Steel (Shawn Levy, 2011)
To say that I went into this with low expectations is a bit of an understatement. When I first saw the trailer in 2011, I thought it looked terrible and kept expecting the robots’ heads to pop up a la Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and immediately dismissed this movie as something not worth watching.
So I very nearly skipped it when it I saw it had been nominated for Group Watch, but I decided to keep an open mind and give it a shot. Unfortunately, it met my expectations - well, not the head-popping expectation, but you know what I mean. I am sitting here racking my brain trying to come up with something that I liked about it but I am at a loss.
I hated or was completely indifferent to every single character in the movie. And I especially hated Charlie. He’s a crappy father (which he doesn’t really ever redeem himself for, if anything he makes it worse through literal child endangerment and making his kid an accomplice to crime) and kind of a crappy person in general. As for Max? He gets pissed at Charlie for taking stupid risks and basically throwing Noisy Boy away, then he insists on keeping Atom because Atom saved him (which, that whole scene is some bullshit. No way in hell did some little kid dig this 1,000 pound hunk of crap out of the mud in the pouring rain, load it on to the cart, and then drag it to the truck by himself. Give me a break), only to take stupid risks with him in the ring.
As to the robots themselves, I never once forgot that I was watching CGI. For a movie called
Real Steel, they sure looked and felt fake to me. The story itself never felt original or interesting and it relied heavily on cheap shortcuts to try to win sympathy points for its characters. Ultimately the whole thing just reeked of cliché and artifice.