Robots Do Not Fight Clean

MST3K quote.

I saw Real Steel the other day, and, uh...it's good. It's really good. Indeed, I only have two quibbles. One, is the minor antagonist is a hugely stereotypical Texan. Think "snaggle-toothed hook-nosed Jewish moneylender"-level stereotypical—I would say that hating Evangelicals and Southerners was the new anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism, but anti-Semitism is coming back in a big way, and anti-Catholicism never left. So it is simply bigoted and bad, in the way that those are bigoted and bad. The other issue is the voice-activated robot should've had commands in Portuguese, not Japanese—he was modded for it for the Brazilian fight circuit, after all. And "golpe no queixo" just sounds cooler than "appaakatto" (yes, the Japanese word for "uppercut" is "uppercut"—as is the French one, at least in savate).

Okay, I had one other issue: several times, the movie slows down to give us extended reaction sequences, which is a pacing mistake. Reaction shots, even several in sequence, are fine, but dragging it out too long just irritates the audience.

Other than those things, awesome, awesome picture. Especially the guy who designed Zeus (and, I suspect, also the kid's robot). That man—basically Takeshi Kaneshiro with a fancy Asian version of Don King's hair—is exactly what a guy who makes boxing robots looks like. Well, except his suits were a little understated; I would imagine he'd go a little flashier (then again, he is a bit young—flashy clothes is more of a "cool ossan" thing, in Japan).

Which reminds me: Astro Boy references. The kid's robot is named Atom. It appears to have an AI beyond simple move recognition. It was discarded by its creator (who, I am convinced, was the above-mentioned gent), and found by someone who treated it like a person. Oh, and at the end, they say the freaking thing showed "heart". Boxing-movie cliche? No, silly, they just translated "kokoro" into English.

They could've stood to be a bit less ambiguous about the "strength" of the protagonist-bot's AI-solution, rather than going the Chobits route. At one point the film seems to imply that Atom has the same learning ability as Zeus, plus what may be some simulacrum of self-awareness; one likes to know where one stands, vis-a-vis whether one is rooting for a character or merely a mobile McGuffin.

Finally: great fights. Not just the choreography, both of the robots and of how the humans move them, but the actual strategy. Boxing, see, is an endurance sport, just as much as MMA or (real) wrestling, and this shows that—apparently Sugar Ray Leonard earned his consultant paycheck.

Also, Hugh Jackman's character talks very much like every boxer I ever knew (they're slightly different from other martial artists, I don't know how to put it).