“Boxing movies are about as American as Budweiser, apple pie, and hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat while drunkenly speeding down a residential road. Ever since Rocky gave America reprieve from the wave of cynical movies raining piss on this great nation of ours in the seventies, Hollywood has consistently made boxing movies for our enjoyment. Even when they suck, there’s something about seeing a plucky underdog take on the champ and either win the day, or lose for the right reasons. Seeing that little scrapper train his way from zero to hero has had audiences shadowboxing their way out of the theater and contracting diseases from consuming raw eggs for decades. Then, for some reason, Shawn Levy, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Don Murphy, decided that robots had to be involved this time. Now we have this thing called Real Steel.”

Read the rest of my review over at Parcbench