M-Net Sunday Night Movie Premiere review: Real Steel

Real Steel is set in the not-too-distant future, when robots have replaced humans in the ring and robot boxing is a multi-million dollar sport spectacle.

Hugh Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a down-and-out fighter/controller who gets one last shot at the big time after he accidentally reconnects with his estranged 11-year-old son (Dakota Goyo), who proves to have a flair and passion for the sport.

For a big-budget, glossy Hollywood story about giant robots beating the scrap out of each other, it’s pretty much exactly what you would expect.

Assuming you’d expect a fun, never-too-deep redemption tale with a jaunty lead performance by Jackman, a surprisingly mature one by Goyo as his son, Max, and spectacular robot battles that show off every cent of the movie’s undoubtedly large budget. The only incongruity really, is that, although the movie is set in the future, it feels like it’s telling a very, very old story.

Specifically, every underdog story from every sports movie ever. Jackman and Goyo are the scrappy underdogs, with the villains taking the form of the scheming Farra Lemkova and the cold, calculating Tak Mashido, who provide the money and the technical expertise respectively to Zeus, the current World Robot Boxing champion.

To the movie’s credit, it never makes Lemkova or Mashido too villainous, they’re just professionals out to do what they do best. In fact, none of the characters are particularly detailed, much like the robots they control, they’re defined a lot more by what they do than who they are.

All of this may make Real Steel sound rather clichéd, and that is certainly one way to read it. Personally though, I prefer to see it as adding a layer of meta-plot to the movie: if robot boxing were an actual sport, this is exactly the type of story that Hollywood would be telling about it. Hopefully, when it comes to the inevitable sequel, they’ll get their inspiration from Raging Bull rather than Rocky..

The verdict: Real Steel is the epitome of a popcorn movie, with all the good and bad that entails.

Real Steel premieres on M-Net Africa and M-Net Africa HD, Sun, 16 Sep at 9pm WAT.

By: Joseph Mosselson