Real Steel. It’s a fighting movie without any
actual fighting. Yes, enormous
animated robots duke it out in various venues, but they’re just robots. This could be a movie about slot car
racing or flying model airplanes.
Here’s the deal: it’s the near future. Hugh Jackman plays a derelict drifter, one whose sole
possessions appear to be a semi truck, a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot, and a 6-pack
of cheap beer. Oh, and he must
have a full gym and a nutritionist and a personal trainer and some actual
motivation in there, too, because I’ve never heard of a derelict drifter in the
kind of shape this guy’s in.
Anyway, he drives from town to town, putting his ‘bot in small-time
bouts for chump change and making bets he can’t cover. He’s bad at it. Enter a long-lost son. Time to grow up. Time to make something of himself. All that. You’ve seen it before.
Look, Jackman’s a super-talented man, Dakota Goyo, who plays the son, is a
super-talented boy, and it’s hard to screw up the “man-child grows up and bonds
with his kid” storyline. But that
storyline is really just a framework for the film’s showcase battles between
various androids, and I couldn’t bring myself to care about them. Not because I didn’t care about Jackman
père
et fils, but because a fight in which the contestants
neither tire nor feel pain is no fight at all. I’m not holding myself out as an expert fighter, here – I’m
basically going on memories of Plebe boxing at USNA. But I remember how I felt after only three rounds, when it
was all my opponent and I could do to keep our gloves up and lob feather-light jabs at one another. Real
Steel’s robots can’t know what that’s like, so I couldn’t care about
them. And since I couldn’t do
that, well, the movie’s marquee moments fell flat.
I think Jackman and Goyo could have carried a
movie about a down-on-his-luck boxer who needed someone to believe in him. The very conceit of Real Steel, however, left me with no
skin in the game.
No comments:
Post a Comment