Review: "Real Steel" (2011)

A starry, blue-eyed cheek-pinch of a film, Shawn Levy's "Real Steel" is a transparent, highly illogical amalgam of every smothering, cloying cliché of middle-American resolve, set, of all places, inside the world of robot boxing. 
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John Gatins' disastrous, leaky script (which is based on a frankly ludicrous premise) touches on everything from a father-son drama, to a washed-up tale of redemption, an underdog sports drama and finally, a boy-and-his-creature nostalgia trip. (The film also serves as yet another edition to 2011's tributes to Amblin, with Steven Spielberg serving as Executive Producer here under his DreamWorks banner.)
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Hugh Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a former-boxer who know makes his living traveling the backroads robots boxing circuit, up to his eyeballs in and deals and debt, scraping together has-been bots in attempt to squeeze out some cash, as he drives his beat-up trailer across the Southern landscape, where good and bad actors like Anthony Mackie (good) and Kevin Durand (bad) spit into ringside microphones mugging for the crowd and the cameras. 
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Then, Charlie is informed that his ex-girlfriend has died, and he is the next of kin to take custody of his 11 year-old son, Max (Dakoto Goyo), whom coldly sells to "Evil Aunt" Debra (Hope Davis) and Uncle Marvin (James Rebhorn), who are away to Italy, and need Charlie to watch Max for the summer. 
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Conveniently, Max is a huge World Robot Boxing (WRB) fan, as he and Charlie snap at each other through illegal boxing rackets in the underground circuit, in which Charlie's impulsivity, recklessness and debt bury him into an even bigger hole. 
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Their fortunes take an appropriate, foreseeable turn for the better as Max finds an old secoond-generation sparring bot (named Atom for the steel-insignia on his chest) in a junkyard and decides (or rather, demands) to fight him in a match.
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The film seems set-up to turn Max into Charlie's voice-of-reason, yet when Max takes Atom to his first fight, he practices the same reckless naivety that got Charlie into trouble in the first place, only to see it blindly work in his favor this time around. 
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Needless to say, Atom, who is taught to box mirroring Charlie's custom moves, works his way up the robot boxing ladder until he's soon fighting in front of millions of fans. Even though Max is the face of "Team Atom," and he dances quite a bit with his Robo-BFF, we're a bit confused on the his role, exactly, given that Charlie not only controls Atom in the ring, but trains him as well.
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Marketed as a quasi-dystopian future-sports drama, "Real Steel" is much more of a vehicle for the imaginations and wonders of those Max's who are sitting in the theater, looking up at the screen in awe of these ten-foot-plus robots battling it out. After all, they're the only ones who can overlook what a colossal mountain of processed cheese this is, with lines like, "I want you to fight for me. That's all I've ever wanted."
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And even as the film slowly strides (or weeps) to its climactic bout, it has spent so much of its energy bowling us over with father-son bonding and tearful monologues that we're practically spent before we learn that the film's biggest shower of schmaltz has yet to wash us out of the theater. 
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Essentially, the film is a testament to the human instinct - of man over machine - as Charlie's washed-up boxing moves (and fatherly influences) eventually make the difference over artificiality. The essence of the film will be lost upon children who just want to take Atom home for themselves - everyone else is simply a witness to this mawkish massacre, one of toughest sits of the year. [D-]