"Real Steel"
Richard's Review: 2 stars
Part Rock'em Sock'em Robots, part "Rocky" with a dollop of "Transformers," "Real Steel" is a family drama about redemption, romance and robots.
Hugh Jackman is Charlie Kenton, a former boxer left behind when the game changed. To keep up with audience demand for more action promoters axed human fighters, replacing them with thousand-pound battling bots. Kenton and his broken down robots barely eke out a living on the circuit, but he sees a chance at making some quick cash when his estranged son reenters his life.
Kenton makes a deal to sell his son for $100,000 to a wealthy relative. The glitch is the adoptive couple will be out of town for the summer, so he'll have to spend three months with young Max (Dakota Goyo) until he can collect his cash. The kid turns out to be a chip off the old block -- stubborn and cocky -- but he loves boxing almost as much as Kenton does. When they uncover a robot named Atom at a junkyard they bond in ways neither could have imagined.
"Real Steel" is a strange movie. It's a father-and-his-son-underdog-romance-redemption-road-trip movie with robots. The funny part is almost all the individual elements work well enough, but when they are slapped together something seems wonky.
The father and son bonding aspect works well enough, although I think if this was real life child protective services might disagree with me on that one.
The underdog story is predictable, but who doesn't like a bit of redemption?
The romance and the road trip aspects are played down, but are both important to the story.
Trouble is the movie is so thick with syrup -- even the robot Atom has a heart of gold -- that it feels like director Shawn Levy has a tendency to let his inner Spielberg get the better of him. By the time little Max says to his estranged father and boxing coach, "I just want you to fight for me… it's all I've ever wanted," the metaphors are flying thick and fast.
The movie tries to be all things to all potential audiences, and, as a result, feels like less than the sum of its parts.
Sports movies are never about the sports. They're always about the subtext, but here you have boxing robots! That's something new. They're not exactly Transformers, but the story insists on ignoring the cool characters -- like the robot Zeus, the mechanical Mike Tyson -- and focus on the more predictable aspects of the story instead.
"The Ides of March"
Richard's Review: 3 1/2 stars
In "The Ides of March," George Clooney (who also directs) plays a Democratic Party candidate. He's the kind of guy who would make the top of Bill O'Reilly's head pop off. He's pro-ecology, anti-oil. He wants to tax the rich and legalize gay marriage. If he leans any further left he'll topple over. Although Clooney has spoken out about many of these topics in real life, hasn't made a left wing film. Instead he's made a warts and all political movie.
The movie focuses its story on Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), an idealistic campaign manager who will do anything to win, as long as he truly believes in the candidate. He is devoted to Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), a candidate in the Democratic primary. The first hour is spent getting into the campaign, learning the machinations of a big league primary run, the behind the scenes. Clooney sets up the themes of the piece -- loyalty, ethics and the hard edge that comes from playing in the bigs -- before taking a right turn -- story wise, not ideologically -- into different territory.
I'm not going to give away the twist, but that's really when the movie picks up steam. The first hour is good stuff, great acting from Paul Giamatti, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and a fascinating, if occasionally dry look at life in the political fast lane. Then comes the blackmail, the meetings in darkened stairwells and double-crossing journalists.
Gosling impresses as he makes his way from idealism to stark realism, and Clooney looks like he was born to sit in an oval office. But it is the supporting cast who really shine.
Giamatti and Hoffman reek of the backroom. They play opponents but are cut from the same cloth, men who are two steps ahead of everybody else in the room.
"The Ides of March" takes a bit too long to get to the game changing moment, but when the acting is this good, it's worth the wait.
"French Immersion"
Richard's Review: 2 stars
It's hard to know how the ROC will react to "French Immersion," a new comedy from the makers of "Bon Cop, Bad Cop." ROC, if you don't know, is Rest of Canada, a term the small town French characters in the film use to describe any part of the country that doesn't fall within Quebec's borders.
"French Immersion" sees a disparate group of five English speakers -- a chef (Jacob Tierney), a flight attendant (Olunike Adeliyi), a mailman (Fred Ewanuick), a firefighter (Martha Burns) and a Member of Parliament (Gavin Crawford) -- enroll at a language camp in a remote town to learn French and have a Quebecois experience. That means no English, not even "American Idol" on TV. One by one they become immersed not only in French culture but in the crazy goings on in this deceptively quiet town.
"French Immersion" is a willfully silly movie about a subject that lies at the very center of Canadian culture. It's an equal opportunity bilingual comedy which gently, but not so subtly, pokes fun at both sides of the language issue.
It plays like a silly sitcom and like a sitcom if you scratch the surface there's not much underneath. Despite tackling one of the country's most divisive topics it doesn't add much to the language debate other than a few one liners like "I love Canada, but I hate the English."
