Robots Rock the Ring

Cast: Hugh Jackman,Dakota Goyo,

Evangeline Lilly

Rating: **1/2

Even if you can’t see the fun in two people pummelling each other in a ring surrounded by hundred others cheering them as bloodily,one can sort of understand what drives boxing. It has to be the fascination of watching human beings at their primal best,the voyeurism fully sanctioned. So why would you want to replace that with two robots boxing with each other,handled from either corners by remote controls? But then more has been excused away under the broad umbrella of “sometime” in the future.

That said,if machines on movies are your thing,there is hardly a better place to go to than Dreamworks and Steven Spielberg — the same team that gave us Transformers.

Here,despite the mass of metal and the mass of scrap that former boxer Charlie (Jackman) works with,the creators manage to give each of the robots a distinct look,even a personality — the jaunty “Ambush”,the flashy “Killer Boy”,the devilish “Twin Cities”,the mighty “Zeus”. And then there is “Atom” — the forlorn ET-esque robot that Charlie’s son Max (Goyo) digs out from a rubbish heap in an industrial junkyard. Max is 11 and met Charlie for the first time a few days earlier. Charlie had broken off all ties with his mother and has taken in Max only for $100,000 after her death. Broke,with the last robot he assembled with his sort-of girlfriend (Lilly) smashed during a fight,Charlie doesn’t blink signing off custody rights to Max for that money.

Obviously Max loves robots as well,is in fact somewhat of a genius at programming them because of all the video game time that he has put in (the film doesn’t dwell on the connection); obviously he drills sense and purpose into Charlie’s drunken existence; obviously Charlie’s sort-of girlfriend likes him; and obviously Atom proves to be a match-winner even as it and Max have their looking-into-the-eye moment that is every child’s dream.

Despite these loose shots at a father-son bonding,and a David-vs-Goliath plot,it’s hard to ignore that this film is most definitely not a children’s movie. They may not be real people in the ring but the violence the robots are put through,from the punching to the kicking to the no-holds-barred grinding (Sugar Ray Leonard was a consultant on the fight scenes),is very much real. The film even goes so far as to have thick red liquid ooze out of a crushed machine — all in the name of Real Steel.

Shalini Langer,shalini.langer@expressindia.com