It Came From The Cineplex: Real Steel

Here's my short visual review of the movie Real Steel:

All in all I enjoyed it well enough. If I was a ten year old it would be my all time favorite movie. It's about a kid with an incredibly indulgent father in a cool profession, who has a hot mom surrogate and best of all has a giant robot playmate. The life every kid dreams of!

Overall it's about as good a movie as you can expect from the artistically bankrupt business model that is modern Hollywood.

By the way, the movie is NOT based on the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots game, as most people keep saying. It's based loosely on the 1956 short story Steel by Richard Matheson. It was later adapted into a 1963 Twilight Zone episode.

Pros:
• It's a movie about boxing robots! What's not to like?

• Cool robot designs. I wish there'd been more of them though.

• The robots all looked absolutely real (to me, anyway).

• Huge Ackman doesn't sing or dance during the movie (although the kid and his robot dance).

• Evangeline Lily in a wife beater shirt!

Cons:
• For a movie about fighting robots, there was surprisingly little robot fighting. Maybe it would have become boring and repetitious if there'd been more fighting? Plus robot fights are no doubt really expensive to film, causing them to pare down the scenes.

• The kid in the movie looks disturbingly like Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace.

• Missed opportunity: They should have made the poster an homage to this image of the Ali/Liston fight.

• The ending was a bit predictable, but hey, it's geared mostly towards kids who haven't seen as many movies as cynical reviewers such as myself.

My verdict: Hey, its a movie about fighting robots! What more do you want from a film? I give it a B.