Real Steel
2011
***
Director: Shaw Levy
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie, Kevin Durand, Olga Fonda, Karl Yune, Hope Davis, James Rebhorn
In the near future, robot boxing has become very popular entertainment. Charlie Kenton is a former fighter who tries to scrape a living as a robot handler, and now he is forced to spend time with his estranged 11-year-old son Max. It is an initially tumultuous partnership, but when the boy turns a discarded sparring bot into a fighter, the two slowly begin to bond. This noisy and schmaltzy family movie combines the metal on metal action of Transformers with the underdog elements from Rocky into a story so formulaic it could have been written by a scripting robot. However, it's all charmingly stupid and adequately entertaining for two hours. Loosely based on Steel, a short story by Richard Matheson.
