Terrific entertainment, and with heart! Yes, heart, and not the steel heart of robots, but the heart of a story that deals with father and son, with old buddy and girlfriend, passion and endurance. All corny and clichee-ridden, but what the heck, extremely well done! All that, and robots hitting the living daylights out of each other. The greatest thing about the film is maybe that it almost completely avoids humanizing the machines, making them warm-hearted and faithful compatriots of our human heroes. None of that crap Transformer infantilism. Even more clever, the script and the director do not only avoid that, but they play with the possibility, bringing the plot sometimes near a point where you would expect the robot to do something stupidly independent, claiming its being a living soul. And then they withdraw and it just does not happen. The audience has been fooled, because it waited for the lie and did not get it. These machines are strong, and heavy, and vicious, but in this they are merely a reflection of their makers and their operators. To the point where Atom, our “hero robot” gets into shadow boxing mode, merely copying the movements of Mr Huge Action’s (sorry, another of these Kermode bonmots) , who is the real boxer in the show.
No need to say how unbearably handsome Jackman is, seems he just will not get old, and if he does, age shapes him into a new genetic reference pool for all the world to drink from… sorry, got carried away there. He is a very watchable actor, is what I am trying to say, and gives as some form of Kurt Russell v.2.1, more handsome, more human, more emotionally approachable, sometimes awkward. Of course the kid he stumbles across is a prototypical smartass one, but I found him still on the acceptable side of the annoyance border. And there is one scene towards the end where he pulls all the stops, when we can witness his love for and admiration of a father (and a girl’s love and admiration for a man – Freckles from Lost, actually) virtually stopping the world, all attention in the middle of a huge fight all of a sudden sucked up by two people watching one, not caring for a moment about what is going on around them. That was a terrific scene, to be remembered.
And honestly, at the end of the Twin City vs. Atom fight, I almost jump up from my cinema seat cheering, almost… damn, why didn’t I?! Awesome! And then when he rope-a-dopes Zeus… awesome!!
59 per cent at http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/real_steel/ ? That is ridiculous, I will send Atom to kick the crap out of these critics!
thomas4cinema 