The robot-boxing movie Real Steel encourages a kind of cognitive dissonance: One side of the brain—the one sipping port and contemplating the latest issue of The Paris Review—dismisses it as stupid, beneath contempt. The other—the one eating Fritos and scratching its balls—snorts in approval, letting out a lobotomized Butt-head chuckle. So Real Steel falls somewhere near the intersection of elation and shame, essentially reworking the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling non-classic Over The Top for the equally ridiculous sport of android fisticuffs, and mostly getting away with it. Part of the film’s appeal is that it never once calls attention to its own patent absurdity: It has an orphan, a dame, and a rusty old fighter nobody believed in, and damned if it doesn’t play every terrible cliché completely straight.
