Real Steel

REAL STEEL (12)

D: Shawn Levy

Dreamworks/Reliance (Don Murphy, Susan Montford & Shawn Levy)

US 2012

122 mins

Science Fiction

W: Dan Gilroy & Jeremy Leven

DP: Mauro Fiore

Ed: Dean Zimmerman

Mus: Danny Elfman

PD: Tom Meyer

Hugh Jackman (Charlie Kenton), Dakota Goyd (Max Kenton), Evangeline Lilly (Bailey Tallet), Anthony Mackie (Finn), Kevin Durand (Ricky), Olga Fonda (Farra Lemkova)

Real Steel puts the sci-fi and sports genres in a blender and comes out with something rather refreshing, thoroughly enjoyable and everything that the Transformers movies lacked.

In a dystopian future where robot-fighting is prime time entertainment, a former professional boxer and his son find a broken down machine on a scrapheap and fix it up to be a title contender.

Though the story is rather far-fetched and follows the usual boxing movie formula, it still remains huge fun, with a dose of human drama thrown in with the relationship between the distant father and his boy. More so than that, the film also manages to make sympathetic characters out of its "robot stars", something Michael Bay failed to do with three attempts up to this point.

7/10