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91Real Steel is directed by "Night at the Museum's" Shawn Levy, who makes good use of his specialized skill in blending people and computer-made imaginary things into one lively, emotionally satisfying story.
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Oct 5, 201180There's a little "Kramer vs. Kramer" here, a dash of "Transformers" there, and it's all topped with big heap of "Rocky." But it's hard to argue with the results, because, at times, Real Steal is close to a knockout.
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75If you can get past the ridiculousness of the setup - easy to do, because the posters make it clear this isn't a Woody Allen movie - it's pretty much impossible not to have fun.
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75The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.
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75It is earsplitting, crowd-pleasing, and, no doubt, 'bot-pleasing, too. If you told me I would get emotionally and viscerally involved in two machines punching the hard drives out of each other, I would tell you you were crazy. I would be wrong.
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75By the time the two hour running length has expired, it's safe to say that Real Steel comes across as a legitimate crowd-pleaser.
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75Real Steel is a real movie. It has characters, it matters who they are, it makes sense of its action, it has a compelling plot. This is the sort of movie, I suspect, young viewers went to the "Transformers" movies looking for.
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75Like "Moneyball," this is real movie making that packs a solid entertainment punch.
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70It goes through all the motions, properly and efficiently, and yet it's missing some core warmth. Watching Real Steel, I kept thinking of Brad Bird's retro-modern cartoon "The Iron Giant," and of how that picture humanized a metal alien so effortlessly.
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70Although the marketing looks like "Transformers 4," Real Steel is the real deal, a Rocky with robots that ought to have audiences standing up and cheering.
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Oct 2, 201170The uncanny thing about Real Steel is just how gripping the fight scenes are; Sugar Ray Leonard served as a consultant to the motion-capture performers responsible for pantomiming the machines' moves.
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67Real Steel falls somewhere near the intersection of elation and shame, essentially reworking the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling non-classic "Over The Top" for the equally ridiculous sport of android fisticuffs, and mostly getting away with it.
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63If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.
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60Rocky with robots? It's not quite in Balboa's weight class, but Real Steel at least has some heft. There's barely a story beat among the beat-downs that you won't expect, and sometimes the saccharine gets in the way of the spectacle, but on the whole this is enjoyable family entertainment.
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Oct 6, 201160When I was 7 and saw "Over The Top," I saw no irony in its moniker, even during a slow-motion close-up of two battling hands. While Real Steel is similarly ludicrous, I predict it will play like a masterpiece with 7-year-olds.
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60As it happens, this recycled reclamation of underdogs saga is neither as bad as it sounds nor quite as good as it could be.
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60Based very loosely on a short story by "I Am Legend" author Richard Matheson, Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: "Paper Moon" or "Over the Top," say.
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60Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, the movie's special effects are seamless and far more cleanly cut than any of Michael Bay's hash. But the element that lingers longest is a subtle strand - also woven into last week's "Take Shelter" - of recessionary anxiety.
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58Real Steel is sci-fi without the science, and the fiction is strictly 20th century, straight out of Rocky knockoffs.
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50The story remains sadly mired in botdom, which leads to some boredom. It's hard to look away from the ever-dazzling Jackman, but the sight of him hunched over the controls of something akin to a live action video game is not, in the end, much more exciting than the sight of your average teenager hunched over the controls of a Game Boy.
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50When making a film for 10-year-old boys, it doesn't have to be good, necessarily -- just good enough. And that's exactly what Real Steel is: good enough.
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50What it lacks is the human element. Charlie is more of a rat than a rascal, and instead of working hard to build and operate his robots, he's literally going through the motions.
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50They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie "Real Steal."
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50It's a combination that seems ideal for 10-year-old boys who adore violence, and could well be the cornerstone of the next DreamWorks franchise.
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50It's an odd blend - a sentimental story in a futuristic world of brutal machine-maneuvered fights. There are some ringside thrills, but it's not a seamless mesh.
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50An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.
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50Sugar Ray Leonard helped with the motion-capture, and it shows. Good stuff. But the tear-jerking in Real Steel is as shameless as its product placement. We're being hustled.
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50A slightly soggy tale of father-son bonding, crossed with an action-adventure flick about high-tech battle-bots.
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50I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.
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50Lost's Evangeline Lilly remains lost, however, in this film role as Charlies's too-good-to-be-true romantic interest.
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50Jackman gamely does his best, Levy keeps the kid just shy of insufferable and just this side of kid-appropriate in his behavior and language.
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50This punishingly predictable tale will test whether sci-fi action fanboys can stomach having their cherished genre infiltrated by sentimental hokum about a down-on-his-luck dad and his spunky long-lost son.
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40In either a stunningly brave or misguided act of meta-absurdity, Real Steel, which is about a boy, his dad and the robot that changes their lives, actually feels as if it were made inside the mind of a kid obsessed with robots.
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38Real 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?
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 54 out of 68
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Mixed: 8 out of 68
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Negative: 6 out of 68
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"Real Steel" is real. It has the visual action with a cheesy but good story. A good entertainment to watch with your kids or family.