374. Real Steel (2011)

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lily, Dakota Goyo

Director: Shawn Levy

Running Time: 127 mins

Real Steel is an American film about a future where one man, who after discovering he is to spend summer with his estranged son, comes across a junkyard boxing robot, and uses it to climb to the top of the robot boxing world, with his son at his side.

This was incredibly cheesy, I’m just going to put that out there. The story and overall concept was indeed a fun and partly interesting idea, but it was in the end extremely repetitive, predictable, and one of the ultimate examples of pure Hollywood cheese.

Firstly, I’ll say that the robot boxing part of this film was pretty cool. Fantastic CGI and great action made these sections of the story truly exciting and entertaining to watch, despite the fact that the entire outcome of the climb of the man and his son was totally foreseeable.

However, I felt that that idea wasn’t put into context very well. Set in the near future, this film could be believable, but there wasn’t any other clear evidence to make the atmosphere that little more futuristic, ruining the pseudo-authenticity somewhat for me.

Also, the fact that this whole film is just Rocky, but made with robots, meant it felt extremely repetitive, as it was just an experience of endless fights, sadness, excitement and subsequent disappointment, making it occasionally boring to watch.

In terms of the cheese, it was plentiful. Chucking the estranged son in the middle of a story where he didn’t really belong was a lovely touch, to make everything more chaotic, there was a love story that lasted about 15 seconds to up le fromage, and the classic ‘from rags to riches’ story did get on my nerves.

However, this film could be quite fun to watch if you ignore all of the Hollywood cheese in it, and because of that, I’ll give this a 6.6.