America, the near future: Giant robots conduct vicious fights in boxing rings for cheap and meaningless entertainment. America, 2011: Hackutron 9000 screenplaybots create cheap and meaningless entertainment about the above and seize more than 3,000 movie screens in the form of “Real Steel.”
“Real Steel” is to action what the Anthony Weiner habit was to sex: It’s so virtual, so distant from the thrill, that you wonder what the point is. Do you really want to pay to watch an actor playing a kid who in turn plays what amounts to a video game?
Ah, say the marketers, but there’s more to it than which remote-controlled pretend robot beats up which. And they’re right. There is schmaltz.
Hugh Jackman plays a scheming, broke former fighter who discovers that his ex-girlfriend has died, leaving him with a son (Dakota Goyo) he never knew he had. As next of kin, Charlie (Jackman) wins the lad but rapidly unloads him on a rich aunt (Hope Davis) for $100K. The only catch is that Charlie must baby-sit the youngster for a summer while his new adoptive parents take a jaunt around Europe. Meanwhile, Charlie will attempt to rebuild his career as puppeteer/manager of large remote- controlled fighting robots. So the endpoint must be a rejuvenation of both soul and gaming skill — Charlie’s Wii-demption.
Almost all movies are underlain by one formula or another, but director Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum,” “Cheaper by the Dozen”) allows you to see the entire movie stretch before you as plainly as a stretch of West Texas highway from the minute the boy, Max, shows up and is revealed to be a smart-mouthed but lovable scamp. Also, he’s an expert on video games and robo-fighting and really needs a father figure.
His big line to his dad is, “I want you to fight for me.” Get it? Except no fighting is necessary. “Not sell me” would have been more accurate.
Jackman has never been convincing as an American — he has to work so hard on the accent, which still sounds a little off, that to him it seems only natural to contort his face while he’s at it. There’s an alarming moment (on a doorstep, toward the end) when Jackman appears to be suffering from sudden-onset multiple dental abscess, and you realize with a start that this is his take on “smiling.”
Supporting characters don’t offer much help. His love interest (Evangeline Lilly), who owns the gym where he used to fight and now trains his robo-fighters, is as factory-built as everything else here. She is here to nab the young-female demographic by flattering it. She is as young women picture themselves: tough, unsentimental, slender, pretty. Too bad the movie (written by men — lots of them) forgot to give her anything to do except tell the son (and us) about how cool Charlie is.
Anthony Mackie — a dismally boring actor who inexplicably popped up in 47 movies this year — plays another robo-fighting impresario, a friendly rival who does nothing to alter the direction of the story, while two villains (a Japanese techie and a slinky babe who jointly run the world-champion bot) don’t give us any particular reason to hate them, or even much dialogue.
Not that I needed more talk in this movie, which lurches from one trite catchphrase to another: “I got this,” “This is what it’s all about” and (this one’s a double-decker) “We can go ’round and ’round on this all night long, but it’s not gonna happen.”
So much is missing, and yet I must have checked my watch 40 times in stupefaction as the film presented a dozen variations on Charlie and the boy bonding while machines smash each other. (You’ll root for the beaten-up old junker, not the high-tech top-of-the-line model, if the relative competitive prowess of objects rouses your emotions.)
Why pick this movie when there are video games?
That way you’d get to participate in honest mayhem instead of passively absorbing it. And video games don’t punish you with somber life-insurance commercial music every three minutes.