Real Steel

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2011
Country of origin:	USA / India
Director:	Shawn Levy
Genre:	Robot boxing puke-a-thon
Starring:	Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo
Rating:	1/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433035/
Tagline:	Courage is stronger than steel.
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

From the director of Night at the Museum 1 and 2(!) this couldn't be as bad as it looked, could it?

The plot:
It's the near future, and Huge Ass Man plays Charlie Kenton, a man who earns his crust competing in robot boxing tournaments, legal or otherwise. We meet him as his luck is very much on a downward spiral. He's out of cash, people are chasing him for money and, worse still, his robot cash cow is destroyed by a very angry bull, quite literally.
An absentee father, Kenton finds a way to earn some money out of his estranged son, and purchases a new robot - Noisy Boy - and enters it into a competition way above its ability level. Soundly thrashed, this robot too is destroyed.
Now, with son Max in tow, Charlie seems all out of options, until his son discovers a robot abandoned, buried, unwanted.
Any guesses what happens next, folks?

With a plot so trite it made the recent Warrior seem positively ground-breaking, this suffers from the blight of Spielberg in exec. producer role, with so much schmaltz and saccharine hurled at the screen you may very well want to hurt yourself.
Ass Man sleepwalks through the movie, truly delivering his lines as if someone told them to him moments before he had to be on set, but the major irritant here is the son, played with upperty smugness by youngster Dakota Goyo or, to give him his true alias, Smackable Shitface. Seriously, if one so young behaved like this around most sentient adults, the belt would be off before two minutes had elapsed.
The little prick.
Incidentally, I have a confession to make. I endured thirty minutes of this before heading back to the car, leaving Mrs. Mo to it in the theatre whilst I listened to a football podcast, before heading back for the climatic battle which, in itself, was about as riveting as back to back episodes of Dad's Army.
Pathetic in every single regard, this is the worst film I've seen at the cinema this year.
Avoid.