Family robot film could be the start of the next genre wave. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

Is robot the new vampire? It just may be, so there's no time like the present to steel oneself (pun maybe intended) for the mini-onslaught that appears to be brewing on the horizon; robots are having a moment. Robots have never really gone away - like vampires and semi-trendy zombies - though in cinema terms they've always had to fight for screen time and attention. The robot made its first splashy appearance during the silent era in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and has been in and out of movies fairly regularly since.

As either characters or symbols, they've tended to fall into one of two camps: the malignant and malevolent threat to us all, or the misunderstood and persecuted victim of human hubris. Robots are an uneasy hybrid of superior beings from another planet and super-computers run amok that we brought down upon ourselves, making them an unwieldy combination of awe-inspiring and scary. And when they are humanized to fall somewhere between those camps (and when it's done well) it's downright confounding. From Isaac Asimov's groundbreaking and thought provoking I, Robot to the affectingly sentimental coming-of-age drama The Iron Giant (starring Vin Diesel's voice), 'bots have proved to be a great way to hold a mirror up to ourselves. Robots are their own special metaphor, and usually say something about our willful abandonment of our humanity as opposed to the circumstantial loss (zombies), theft (vampires), or suppression (werewolves) of it. And now the tin men, as it were, are experiencing a mini-renaissance, if the planned remake of Paul Verhoeven's classic urban satire RoboCop, the seemingly inexhaustible Terminator movies, Will Smith's I, Robot, the mere existence of the convulsively saccharin Bicentennial Man and A.I., and, most obviously, the miserable Transformers series' success are to be believed. And Hollywood's two buzziest in-production films at the moment are screen treatments of the zombie apocalypse novel World War Z - and Daniel H. Wilson's freshly published Robocalypse - whose title says it all.

Real Steel is one of the most bizarre robot movies to ever come down the pipe, which doesn't mean it's lacking in any charm. Based loosely on a short story by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend), the film is a wholly predictable amalgam of Rocky and every disconnected father and son melodrama ever made. Quite notably, Matheson's story, simply called "Steel," is about a washed up boxer in a future where human boxing is illegal, who disguises himself as a mechanical pugilist in order to get back in the ring. That's a far thematic cry from this version.

Hugh Jackman plays the broke and broken down (as "broken down" as Jackman can look anyway), contrary, unlikable former fighter and current boxing promoter Charlie Kenton, a man living on the verge of financial and personal oblivion. He hustles himself from one back-alley fight to the next with his robot boxers, losing most, hiding from those he owes, and remaining steadfastly isolated from the world. Disrupting Charlie's life quite out of the blue is 11-year-old Max (Dakota Goyo), the product of a long-dead relationship that becomes his new responsibility when the boy's mother dies. Charlie is unwelcoming, repeatedly crushing a child desperate for affection and approval until he discovers Max could be a financial boon. It seems Max is a young robot wizard, and so after the barest explanation, Max, Charlie, and love interest Bailey (Evangeline Lilly, Lost) reconstruct a decrepit robot called Atom and turns it (him?) into a star fighter and attraction. It's really not hard to imagine where things go from there if you can figure out how to marry The Champ to Rocky.

The problem with the redemption part of this whole ordeal is Charlie. Characters like Charlie have dotted the cinema landscape for decades, and always wind up finding their deeply repressed but loving inner parents. In Real Steel, however, Charlie is so genuinely abrasive it's entirely unbelievable that Bailey would give a guy like Charlie the time of day, never mind help him and Max in their quest (okay, she'd help Max). His attitude toward Max borders on abusive, and so it's unbelievable that Max would tolerate him as long as he does, never mind that he maintains his sweet disposition. Atom as the more "human" of the two should be a pointed irony but it's not. A toaster is more human than Charlie. He simply has too far to go.

Not only is Charlie's personal growth ultra-expedient, Real Steel is a crowded movie that suffers from a few too many homages. Aside from the obvious, it's a sport movie, and sport movies don't always mix with quasi-sci-fi unless we're talking about The Running Man. The underdog motifs are myriad: there're training montages, Charlie hits an even lower low before finding out what's truly important in life, there is wisdom from the mouths of babes, etc, etc. It's all very familiar and formulaic, but oddly Real Steel's weaknesses ultimately prove to be its strengths.

There are no surprises of any sort in Real Steel, on top of which it's a DreamWorks film - meaning, Steven Spielberg's simplistic, sentimental fingerprints are all over it. Given the source material, it's disheartening to imagine the film this could have been without Spielberg's influence (the same goes for the almost great Super 8 and the hilariously bone-headed new dinosaur series Terra Nova). Familiarity allows viewers to dispense with paying attention to predictable plot points and just sit back and let Jackman and Goyo's engaging performances wash over them. The two have a dynamic that works despite hackneyed material and predominantly pedestrian direction by writer John Gatins and director Shawn Levy (the even more pedestrian Date Night). As a bonus, as any good sport movie should, Levy does manage to make the climactic fight jump off the screen, and Jackman, through sheer force of will, allows Charlie's athletic regrets to float to the surface and gives the film the emotional kick in the pants it needs. Bottom line Real Steel is every bit as goofy as you thought it was going to be, but it doesn't totally humiliate its robot brethren. And watching Hugh Jackman work out in soft focus is never a bad thing.

Real Steel opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 10/08/2011 page4)