Robot boxing

October 7, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

‘Real Steel’ has a little more than just fights

Orlando Sentinel

“Real Steel” is “Transformers” meets “The Champ,” a cute, occasionally sentimental father-son bonding picture with Rock’Em Sock’Em boxing robots as its backdrop.

And if that doesn’t scare you off, by all means, read on. It is science fiction and it does star Hugh Jackman, after all. And there’s a little more beneath the surface than just the crowd-pleasing fights.

In the post “Battle Bots” near future, boxing has faded away. What gets the bloodlust up in a crowd, at county fairs, in underground fight clubs or on TV, is the see two boxing robots tear each other to pieces in the ring.

Charlie (Jackman) is an ex-fighter who travels the back roads, putting his late-model robot into fights with bulls, other robots, all comers. And since the robot has seen better days and Charlie is a born loser, he’s always losing and always slipping out of town without paying off his bets. And he’s always slipping back into his ex-girlfriend’s (Evangeline Lilly) run-down boxing gym/robot parts shop to start over.

Charlie is so hard up for cash that when he learns he has a son from a long-ago relationship and that the boy’s mother has died, he sells custody of the kid to the woman’s sister. But the deal is that Charlie keeps the kid for the summer so’s the rich folks can go on their European vacation in peace.

With that cash and that fresh-mouthed kid, Charlie buys back into the game and heads back on the road. The kid finds his own junked sparring ’bot. And as their mechanical alter egos fight in abandoned warehouses and meet colorful characters like the promoter Finn (Anthony Mackie, classing up the joint), maybe their luck will change.

“Real Steel” bears little resemblance to “Steel,” the Richard Matheson story on which it’s based, or the classic “Twilight Zone” episode that hewed close to that story.

What director Shawn (“Night at the Museum”) Levy went for instead was a toy tie-in, an overlong movie that takes on some of the grimy veneer and colorful characters of a “boxing picture,” sanitizing it for children.

Jackman gamely does his best. Levy keeps the kid, Goyo, just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language. And the fights, better animated than those far-sillier “Transformers” movies, do have a visceral feel to them. You could totally see boxing going this “BattleBots” route and people signing up for, and betting on the outcome of, pay-per-view bouts that pit unfeeling, speechless machines against each other in fights to the death.

It might be cheaper, though, just to buy a Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots set.