Real Steel

Real Steel is a movie that could save you a lot of time as a parent. If you're hoping to provide your child with a cinematic education, just two hours at the theater this weekend will save you from having to show The Champ, Rocky, Rocky III, Over the Top, countless down-and-out-dads-earn-a-son's-respect movies, Rising Sun, and all the movies where plucky upstarts take on evil teams, etc.

So many unoriginal moments (and let's not forget that one could be forgiven for incorrectly thinking it is a movie version of the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots table game) are crammed into Real Steel that it bursts at the seams and comes in at 127 minutes, way too long for a movie targeted squarely at 12-year-old boys.

But for 12-year-old boys, none of this means it is necessarily a bad movie. After all, when I was 12, Sylvester Stallone's arm wrestling epic Over the Top was cinema at its finest.

Real Steel is set in the distant world of 2020, where all that appears to have changed is that we have replaced human boxers with robots, cell phones have gone a bit holographic, junkyards have pretty intense security, and Del Taco has reached Georgia (Sprint, however, is still “The Now Network”).

Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is a washed-up former boxer, now making his living on the underbelly of the professional robot boxing circuit. While scrambling for money and from creditors, he learns that an old girlfriend has died, possibly leaving him custody of Max (Dakota Goyo), a child he never met. Max has an aunt that really wants him, but that aunt has a husband that really wants a summer vacation—so he and Charlie e a secret deal. Charlie will take Max for the summer while the aunt and her husband go on vacation, and in return Charlie gets enough money to buy a new robot.

Max doesn't really want to be there, especially once he learns he was sold, but through the bickering he and Charlie begin to form a bond. While scavenging for robot parts with Charlie, Max finds an entire robot of his own and begins fighting him to attention-getting success.

As mentioned above, anybody with any experience with sports and father-son movies will not be surprised by any turn of events. For the adults in the audience, satisfaction will have to be found in well-done CGI during the robot fights (even if their inhumanity depletes the brutality of any impact). Uninspired acting will have to be overlooked, and an overwrought score will have to be endured.

To a kid, though, it'll mostly be the first time seeing all of this, and it quite likely will push all the pleasure buttons with a minimum of stuff likely to make a parent cringe (some drunkenness early, gambling, and one scene of unabashed animal cruelty that goes uncommented upon within the movie). Nothing touches a tween's soul like a tween that dominates in the world of adults.