{"id":560,"date":"2011-10-11T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T19:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ealasaid.com\/writing\/reviews\/?p=560"},"modified":"2022-06-11T11:14:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T18:14:23","slug":"real-steel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/2011\/10\/11\/real-steel\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Steel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nDirected by: Shawn Levy
\nStarring: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangelie Lilly, Kevin Durand
\nRated: PG-13 for some violence, intense action and brief language<\/p>\n

Disney has many strengths, and \u201cReal Steel\u201d plays to two of them: telling heartwarming tales about underdogs and offering sweet stories about kids and parents bonding. The latter sometimes spills over into laughably twee territory, but \u201cReal Steel\u201d manages to avoid that. No, this is not a groundbreaking art film. This is a movie to see if you want to watch giant robots fight and maybe get a little sniffly watching an underdog father-son team learn to care about each other while beating the odds.<\/p>\n

The year is 2020 and boxing has been replaced with a high-tech version of Rock \u2018Em Sock \u2018Em robots: massive humanoid machines attempt to destroy their opponents, controlled by humans outside the ring. Charlie (Hugh Jackman) used to be a boxer, and now is trying to make a living doing robot boxing, but he doesn\u2019t think ahead. As a result, he\u2019s up to his ears in debt, running from creditors and trying to stay afloat.<\/p>\n

His son Max (Dakota Goyo) comes back into his life and is ecstatic to find that his father does the robot boxing he\u2019s obsessed with. He strongarms Charlie into taking him on the road, and when he manages to salvage an early-model fighting robot, he gets Charlie to help him get into the competitions. So now there are three underdogs: a semi-abandoned eleven-year-old, a washed-up boxer, and a barely-functional, ancient fighting \u2018bot.<\/p>\n

The centerpiece of the film is the relationship between Max and Charlie, and it works. Jackman brings a lot of enthusiasm to his part and has a gift for playing stubborn ne\u2019er-do-wells. More importantly, Goyo manages to be spunky without being annoying. The characters are well-written and it\u2019s fun watching the two of them warm up to each other. Add good use of montage and snappy dialog, and \u201cReal Steel\u201d is a bunch of fun. Director Shawn Levy also helmed both \u201cNight at the Museum\u201d films, and he brings the same comedic touch here.<\/p>\n

Of course, what is going to draw most folks, especially the kids it\u2019s aimed at, to \u201cReal Steel\u201d is the titular robot fighting, and it does not disappoint. The robots are created with a mix of animatronics (for close-ups) and CGI (for walking and fighting shots). As a result, they move and interact with humans in a way that is very believable, and that belief carries into the matches and makes them breathtaking. CGI excels at creating non-human objects, and the robots are perfect for that.<\/p>\n

At its heart, \u201cReal Steel\u201d is an underdog movie aimed at kids but enjoyable for grown-ups too. It\u2019s a standard underdog story with a new context, and fun enough that it feels shorter than its two-hour running time. It\u2019s probably not for those looking for grit and realism, but the young and the young at heart are in for a treat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Directed by: Shawn Levy
\nStarring: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangelie Lilly, Kevin Durand
\nRated: PG-13 for some violence, intense action and brief language<\/p>\n

Disney has many strengths, and \u201cReal Steel\u201d plays to two of them: telling heartwarming tales about underdogs and offering sweet stories about kids and parents bonding. The latter sometimes spills over into laughably twee territory, but \u201cReal Steel\u201d manages to avoid that. No, this is not a groundbreaking art film. This is a movie to see if you want to watch giant robots fight and maybe get a little sniffly watching an underdog father-son team learn to care about each other while beating the odds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[47,43,57],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-fun","tag-good","tag-rated-pg-13"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/RealSteel.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2oSX4-92","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1534,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/1534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}