I'll admit this up front: Real Steel is one of the few films I've seen that leads with action — robot boxing counts as action, surely — and hides the sentiment behind it, then somewhere near the end had me genuinely tearing up. A little embarrassing to confess, but it's the truth. Looked at coldly, the plot has some serious holes (more than one, come on — where do you find a kid that sensible and a father that clueless?), but the idea the film is reaching for is clear and it lands. Maybe it's my own background, but father-son stories pull harder at me. Douban currently has it at 8.2. I'd planned on four stars; because it's a father-son film I steeled myself and gave it five. So one of those stars is pure personal bias — fair warning.
The story is simple enough: a washed-up boxer gets prodded back toward himself by a sharp kid, and ends up with a family worth having. As a fight movie, though, the robot bouts really did get my adrenaline up. ATOM's climb-from-the-bottom arc is a cliché, no argument, but it fits the machine's self-learning design nicely. Never mind the sweet blue eyes and the frankly huggable body — the hooks and uppercuts alone had me buzzing. ATOM also becomes the channel through which Charlie and his son finally start talking, and understanding each other. And honestly, having a kid that sensible is a gift: even a screw-up of a father stops being one once that kid gets to work on him.
On to the cast. Jackman I don't know well — I'll own it, I never really sat through Wolverine or X-Men — but the short hair and the stubble had me at hello. Odd discovery, though: I'd always assumed his face was square, and it turns out his head is a rectangle. Maybe the Wolverine sideburns are what threw me off all these years. Then the female lead appears and I yelped, because Evangeline Lilly is in this! Why do I like her? Because she spent all those seasons paired with Jack on Lost, and affection by association is a perfectly legitimate thing, thank you. The kid is a charmer too — a little street-dance machine, Bieber vibes immediately. And a technical prodigy on top of it: the way he assembles robots is genuinely impressive, enough to make me a bit ashamed of myself. What was I doing at eleven? Memorizing Tang poems at school.
A few complaints to close. Did HP pay for this or what? Every screen in the film is HP. And the Japanese is everywhere — that loudmouth robot, one glance and you know it's a Japanese build, with the characters (Japanese? Chinese?) plastered all over it in a way that's honestly a bit gross. On the plus side, I love Charlie's phone: a transparent touchscreen, the same thing as that concept handset that leaked a while back. The robots' voice control is impressive too — the arena is deafening and it doesn't seem to interfere with the signal in the slightest.