My Ballet Robot

I went to visit my family this past weekend, and we decided to watch the movie Real Steel. My parents were like "Oh, it's such a good movie!" while my brother stood in the corner and slowly shook his head at me.

My brother was right, it was pretty terrible.

Why? 

I wanted to like the characters, I really did...

but it was so very hard. Hugh Jackman played a guy named Charlie Kenton who owns a robot boxer and was just a giant jerk. Also an irresponsible loser who tries to use people. Oh yeah, and also he's in a lot of dept ... because he's friggin dumb.

Charlies old girlfriend (whom he hasn't seen in years because he's a massive douche) dies and Charlie gets custody of his and this lady's son (bla bla bla, how original).

His son is like twelve or something, his name is Max, and he's a dick. There was hardly any point in this movie where I didn't want Max to get hit by a bus. At one point he says that he learned Japanese (or something) from "playing video games" because "all the best ones are in Japanese"... that pretentious little shit.

Normally I'd be like "oh, he's grieving, he did just lose his mom after all" but there was no grieving going on. Max did not seem sad at any point. It fact, his mother was barely mentioned. It seemed like her only function for the movie was to die so that her bratty kid could go live with his dickwad dad.

We're dicks! Hilarious!

Oh yeah, and the kid is like a genius or something. Because that happens so often.

It's implied that the robot is sentient...

So Charlie and Max get a new robot. It has a feature that makes the robot mimic you. For some reason Max goes full-on retard one day when he's playing with the robot and it, get this, mimics him and Max is like "you can understand me, cant you?" or some crap like that. No, dumbass, the robot cant understand you. It's a fucking robot.

At another point Charlie does something of the same sort.

And at a third point, Max is dancing at the robot it it mimics him and he seems to sort of think that.. the robot is dancing with him? Or something? 

So, you'd think that if they're going to do the whole "robot who understands" bit they'd at least go somewhere with it, right? Like the robot saves the kid or the dad at some point, on his own, right? Nope. They put that whole stupid thing in there for nothing.... yep.

The character of Bailey could have been anyone else...

Or, even, not existed at all.

So Charlie lives at a gym. It's run by a lady named Bailey who's dad used to run it back when humans did the boxing. She's a pointless, one-dimensional character. She apparently has some feelings for Charlie, but they're expounded upon so little that they needn't have even been there.

 She sort of acts as a mechanic for Charlie but she was so boring that  I personally really would have rather had a cliche wise-cracking guy mechanic. 

It's frustrating because it could have been such a great character, and they just let it be terrible.

The characters are stuck in the past...

Mainly Charlie and Bailey.

Charlie was a great boxer once. Well, guess what, in that movie human boxing doesn't exist anymore. Robots just fight each other. So you'd think he'd move on, grow up, get a job, right? Nope, instead he does the robot righting.
 It doesn't seem like any of his fighting skills transferred over into robot righting, either, because he's thousands of dollars in dept to the guys who host the robot fights. He always loses. His robot gets trashed and then he spends thousands of dollars on a new one, who also gets trashed right away. He never learns. He wont give up on a dream that's dead.
Now, I know this sounds like a good thing, but it's really not. If you've lived for more than ten years you'll know that you sometimes have to grow, and leave old dreams behind. Holding onto dead ones just isn't healthy. Also, I doubt Charlie was that great of a boxer. At one point you hear that he once almost won a fight against "the best boxer in the world" but then later on in the movie he gets the piss kicked out of him and he doesn't even get any good hits in.

Bailey runs a boxing gym. If you watch the movie you'll notice that it's always empty. Because human boxing doesn't exist anymore. There is no reason anyone would go to it unless they're Charlie (who doesn't pay Bailey rent like he's supposed to, by the way). She's broke but she wont give up the gym because it was her father's. You know what her father probably wouldn't want her to do? Starve. But she wont move on.

The underdogs win because they teach the robot boxing...

So robot fighting is this huge thing. It's now the thing everybody watches and it's the sport of... the whole world. So you know what nobody apparently did? Use any kind of organized fighting moves.
Charlie and Max eventually beat the best robot in the entire world because they programmed boxing moves into their robot. Really? Really?! Nobody has ever thought to do that? Or program their robot to know martial arts or something?

I'll teach my robot ballet and we'll destroy them all!

My point is this: I would rather live the rest of my life with bendy straws instead of hands then watch Real Steel a second time.