Real Steel: 5 (out of 10)

Robots! Punching! Whoo!

I kindof wanted that to be my entire review for Real Steel - three words and a score. But it doesn't quite fit.

Real Steel is a mix of three genres - the up-and-coming-scrappy-fighter boxing/martial-arts movie, the (surprisingly small) robot combat fest, and the father-learns-to-fight-for-his-estranged-son tear jerker. It mixes these genres surprisingly well, and while all of them are a little thin, all receive adequate attention from the director and actors. I came for the second genre, and was worried that the other two would annoy me; but no, my annoyance came from other quarters.

My first gripe came before the movie - why was this not titled Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots? Yes, this would have focused more heavily on the robot fighting; but that's clearly what I was there for, anyway. But I suppose that this had to be left out so that the other two genres could be alluded to in the title. Aah, well.

While the fight scenes were, for the most part, well-done and fun to watch, I had some major problems with the combat itself. Part of what makes martial-arts movies work is the knowledge that we are watching a sport, and these sports have rules. Early on, the fights were underground affairs, unsanctioned fights to the death, and the relative lack of consistent rules made some sense; weapons may vary, weight classes don't really exist, and if one side cheats a little bit, hey, them's the breaks! But later, when we we're in the Big Leagues, we see the bad-guy bot hitting the good-guy bot as he's getting up from a knock-down - and that's okay? Then why wasn't that happening all the time? And why does Zeus get pistons, anyway? It just felt inconsistent, and that took away from the up-and-coming-fighter storyline.

(Along these same lines - what exactly makes one robot dramatically better than another? I wish that this had been explained in some way other than "heart". The concept of weight classes would have helped here.)

Finally, while my biggest gripe might be considered a bit esoteric, hear me out: the user interfaces for the robots were inconsistent and, for the most part, outright bad. There are four families of controls shown:

1. Large sit-down control pods with multiple controlling individuals. These are used by the Rich Bad Guys, and we don't really learn much about them. Still, they seem potentially useful.

2. Keyboard/Wii-U controller - a large touchscreen with extra buttons/control sticks on the side, used by a single individual. This was used early in the movie by the Good Guys, and seemed plausible to me.

3. Voice-based technology - the operator yells out commands into a microphone, mostly involving combat macros (left-right-uppercut). This works very poorly, but it's the primary combat system for most of the movie.

4. Mimic technology - the bot mirrors the actions of its controller. This is apparently obsolete technology, probably because it's absurdly dangerous. It's also the key to the movie.

The movie shows that combat effectiveness improves as we move along this chart. There may be a place for all of these technologies in the overall setup, sure; but for a primary interface for one-on-one combat, I'd rather use a controller than a Kinect or a microphone. Me, I see the technologies as growing more and more imprecise, at least if the robots are human-controlled. (This changes if the fights are primarily controlled by AIs, in which case we're really getting into robot dog fighting instead... but I digress.)

A few shorter notes:

• As a near-future science fiction movie, not much had really changed except the introduction of combat robots, the loss of other martial arts as public spectacles, more wind farms, and the introduction of large junkyards with big pits. This was disconcertingly boring.

• $50k buys you a combat robot? That's really cheap - or at least it seems to be until you realize that money is never really discussed outside of robot fighting circles.

• I wouldn't want to be standing next to several tons of fighting robot. Apparently, this doesn't bother anybody in the Near Future.

• Why didn't Wolverine use his claws? That would have shown 'em!

• While I was happy with Hugh Jackman's acting overall, I really think that his character started out as too stupid. I suppose it was good for the character arc, but his intensity was foolish.

• The movie was really aimed at younger kids - 8-12 year-old boys, I'd say - but the language skewed it up into PG-13 territory. (No, the violence probably didn't, because the MPAA is silly.) I found this odd.

• The product placement made me laugh, but none more so than the HP ads throughout. Oh, HP, you're so doomed!

Anyway - it was fine. I had a good time. But it was not a great movie.

Rating: 5/10 (** 1/4 out of 4)

Trailer Watch - the Coming Attractions were pretty much terrible. We got a Steven Spielberg wartime tear-jerker with War Horse, which comes out at Christmas-time and I haven't heard of before. They showed the John Carter of Mars trailer again, which is growing on me (but not enough for me to suspect it'll be a watchable movie in the end). Arthur Christmas continues to look completely uninteresting, even if it is from Aardman. And Johnny English 2 was possibly the worst trailer I've seen since The Country Bear Jamboree - 80s kid comedy sensibilities don't play well with this decade nor with Rowan Atkinson. They were definitely skewing young.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon: 6 (out of 10)

The most important thing you have to know about Transformers 3 is that it's significantly better than Transformers 2. No, this was not a high bar; but honestly, if it had been worse, I would have recommended that you run screaming. Instead, I suggest to you that this is a good action movie that plays nicely to Michael Bay's strengths, and is perhaps his best work since The Rock.

I do have to admit, most of the actual components of the movie are pretty questionable. The live-acting ranged from "adequate" (Shia LaBeouf, John Turturro) to "slumming it" (John Malkovich, Frances McDormand), with just a touch of "incompetent" (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). The characters were weak, even by the standards of summer action movies. The plot holes were profound, both internal to the movie and in terms of basic physics. It was padded, and could have easily lost 30-45 minutes of footage through responsible editing (perhaps leaving out the entire prologue). The dialogue was forgettable. The "extraneous" characters of old movies were more annoying than ever. It was still difficult to tell the 'bots apart. The story was still more about the humans than about the 'bots. And so forth.

But that said, the movie did a whole lot right. The plot may have been weak, but it was epic, relevant, grounded in the style of Transformers episodes of years past (specifically The Ultimate Doom), and it mostly held together. The relationship between humanity and the Cybertronians (both sides) was actually fairly interesting and finally felt established. The movie didn't spend much time in the "wacky" humor genre, unlike its predecessors, and was much better for it. The robots seemed like characters this time, and (slightly) less like plot contrivances. Overall, most of the "garbage" from the last movie was taken out, and replaced with more action scenes.

And oh, what action scenes they were! The special effects were more self-assured than the previous movies, even as their scale increased. Transformers would change forms regularly and without undue focus; this made for less jarring and more interesting action scenes, and allowed for the robots themselves to seem more like characters than simple plot contrivances. Beyond the technical marvel, the fight scenes mostly to hold together, and some of them even evoked scenes from the original Animated Movie. And the entire last 40 minutes in Chicago, even if didn't hold up to much scrutiny - that is why we watch Michael Bay movies! Sure, it may not have made a lick of sense; but the action was good enough to make up for that.

Given my fascination with these characters, perhaps I should talk a little bit about the individual 'bots. Optimus actually had a personality this time, which was interesting. Bumblebee was important but under-utilized, a bit surprisingly. The Wreckers didn't irritate me, nor did the two mini-bots. I admit to geeking out a little bit about Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime. Shockwave was less well-utilized than Darth Maul, but just as cool. Soundwave turned out to matter as a character, hooray! I'm shockingly okay that Laserbeak spoke. And the Nameless Decepticon Hordes... well, I'm okay with them, I suppose, but it'd be nice if the Autobots got some too.

In short: this was the best of the trilogy by any standards. In terms of a summer blockbuster, it was fun; in terms of real cinema, it wasn't so great. And if, like me, you're a Transformers fan, this is as good of a movie as we're likely to get.

Some other points:

• While I didn't really care for the "it's so hard to get a job" element of the plot, it didn't actually ruin the movie.

• I really can't get over how awful Carly was. She was a bad character, her actress was horrible, and the repeated reminders of "haha, you don't get Megan Fox anymore!" were blatant and annoying. Yes, she has quite a body, and Bay did a good job of showing it off. That's not enough.

• What happened to the Twins from the second movie, anyway? I'm happy they're gone, yes; but given how important it was that the Autobots were few in number, you'd think that having ~20% of your numbers just "missing" would be worth noting somewhere.

• A note on expectations: I have found that surviving movies like this is really dependent upon keeping your expectations in check. The first movie initially looked promising but worthless; it turned out to be acceptable and stupid. Score! The second movie looked to be terrible out of the gate, and it turned out to be even worse that; but I had gone in with such low expectations that it at least didn't hurt too much (at the time). So when it came to this third movie, my expectations were simple: "it's got to be better than number two, yes?".
  This modest goal was easily met.

• Since I mentioned Michael Bay's earlier work in that first paragraph, I should note that his best movie is still Bad Boys, and that the rest of his body of work falls far below that early effort.

• I saw this movie in IMAX 3-D. The IMAX part was worth the trouble; the special effects were worth the screen real estate. The 3-D, though, didn't add anything to the movie, though it didn't seem to take anything away either.

Rating: 6/10

Sucker Punch: 2 (out of 10)

It would be easy to dismiss Sucker Punch as simply pandering to its audience. Yes, the movie aims at geek culture in general, teenage males in particular; and as such it certainly offers as much skin and anime-style action as it can provide within the confines of a PG-13 rating. But Punch does not want to just pander to its audience; instead, it aims to be something more than just your average Summer Action Movie, hoping perhaps to reach the lofty heights of "art". Unfortunately, this ambition turns out to be the movie's undoing.

The movie's story is simple but purposefully convoluted. A girl's wicked stepfather sends her to a mental institution, where she will be lobotomized in five days. To escape this horror, she withdraws into a dream world; in this world, she lives as a slave in a high-class brothel. Within this still-nightmarish dream world, she retreats yet further into a series of yet-more-nightmarish worlds, where she learns to fight for her own survival and for the freedom of her friends.

The heart of the movie lies in these "shell" worlds. The "third shell" contains the action set pieces and self-esteem boosters; the "second shell" provides the drama, dialogue, and characters; and the "first shell" provides a shell and framing device for the rest of the movie. Specifically, the ambition of the movie lies in the interaction of the second and third shells, with the use of dream violence in the third world working to impact real events in the first world - basically, an odd combination of Brazil and Shutter Island.

Unfortunately, this just plain doesn't work. The interaction between the second and first layers is grossly underdeveloped - for instance, most of the characters only have dialogue in the second shell! This ruined any potential connection between the first and third layers and, frustratingly, any potential from the overall story. While some exposition at the end of the film tries to paper over this gaping hole, this only draws notice to the flaw.

Still, to be fair, the trailers did not lie. The action scenes in the third shell are plentiful and packed with special-effects; the action itself is well choreographed, within the sensibilities of Zack Snyder; and the stars of the film are scantily-clad females with large guns and swords fighting robotic samurai, zombie Nazis, martial-arts robots, and the occasional dragon. But these action scenes begin and end by roughly explaining the subtext within, making the metaphors as much a part of the action as the special effects themselves. This makes the metaphors as "real" as the special effects, which is rarely a good sign.

I'm not sure what it would have taken to make this into a good movie. It would have taken more than improving any single element of the film; the whole thing was simply under-engineered for the job, from the vision and script to the acting and musical selection. While perhaps it wasn't a total loss - it should at least provide interesting cosplay opportunities for years to come - it was a significant disappointment over already low expectations. Avoid.

Rating: 2/10 (* 1/2 out of 4)

The Green Hornet: 3 (out of 10)

Much as it surprises me to say it, the biggest failing in The Green Hornet is not Seth Rogen. Oh, sure, Rogen doesn't help matters any; not only is he miscast in the role, but his standard on-screen-character is miscast just as badly, and his co-authorship of the script didn't do him any favors. No, the fundamental problem was that the script is too specific in its subject matter: a classic radio serial drama, long-forgotten and remade for a modern comic-book audience after. It turns out that nobody knows how to make such a beast, and what we're left with is a bit of an uneven mess.

One example of this unevenness was the film's treatment of "heroic" violence. Kato is generally unarmed, and the Green Hornet carries a gas gun, ostensibly because such a weapon is non-lethal. But their car (the Black Beauty, as much of a character as the two protagonists), is equipped with machine guns, rocket launchers, and a flame thrower, and the pair uses these weapons indiscriminately. Often this is played as simple "cartoon" violence - the baddies are not even scratched by the rocket fire - but every now and then, somebody is killed messily. But every now and then, the pair of them kill somebody messily - and there's no difference in tone, no acknowledgement of difference on the pair's part. Most worrisomely, this feels both intentional and un-considered, almost accidental. The script is attempting to merge the sensibilities of the serials, the old films, the current comic audiences, and the modern need for pretty special effects; and the combination just doesn't work.

The characters are similarly confused. Headlining the film, Seth Rogen's character of Britt Reid plays a wide variety of roles - not just a millionaire playboy by day and a hero by night, but the unfortunate buffoon upstaged by his assistant; a man-child; a loveable buffoon; a moral crusader; and, most irritatingly, a sex-crazed CEO. This might have worked if presented over a number of iterations, but as it stands this confusion just made the character irritating and unlikeable.

The acting itself is, for the most part, uninspired. Christoph Waltz does an acceptable turn as the Big Baddie, but isn't given enough of a character to be anything more than a caricature. Jay Chou shows flashes of depth as Kato, but the script doesn't really allow it to go anywhere. Cameron Diaz is, well, Cameron Diaz. And Rogen, well, I don't generally dislike him as an actor, but I don't feel like I had much of a choice with this character. The only character I can say that I liked was Axford, the editor of the paper, but that's just because he was played by Edward James Olmos and he stayed out of the way.

For all of that, I can't say that I hated the movie. This would have made a good comic; in fact, it felt like the conversion from script to storyboard to screen was extremely solid, showing a pretty decent understanding of the source material at all of its levels. The action scenes were generally fun (if, again, cartoon-y), and might well have been well suited for 3-D. The gadgets were nifty. The story held together acceptably. And there were parts where I laughed, mostly surrounding the actual connection between comic and film.

Maybe it would have helped if the movie had chosen whether it was a comedy or an action movie. Maybe it would have helped if the film had been more focused on a single component of the entire concept of Green Hornet. Or maybe all it would have taken would have been to cast somebody that didn't co-write the movie in the lead role. But whatever it would have taken to make this an acceptable movie, this wasn't it.

Rating: 3/10 (* 3/4 out of 4)

The King's Speech: 8 (out of 10)

When I arrived at the theatre to see The King's Speech today, the line was out the door, a pretty even mix of old and young and in-between, families and couples and individuals. Two minutes into the waiting, somebody came out and announced that there were only 80 tickets left; the line was about 100 people in by this point, and growing. My date and I were the last two people to be sold tickets. And this was for a matinee showing of an art movie that has been showing at this location for two weeks - and was apparently sold out every show.

I suppose that word of mouth works.

The King's Speech tells the story of King George VI, and specifically his speech impediment. The movie begins with Prince Albert (the future King) giving his first radio speech to the British Empire - or, more accurately, failing to do so. His wife sets out to find help for her husband, and comes across an unconventional Australian speech therapist named Lionel Logue. Hijinks ensue - mind, hijinks set against the 1930s British politics, and specifically the start of World War II.

The highlight of the film is its exceptional cast, both in terms of the acting provided by the cast, and through the casting itself. The film is a who's-who of UK cinema, starting with Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Logue; both play their roles with aplomb, with Firth offering an especially impressive vocal turn to his role. But the supporting cast is just as good - Helena Bonham Carter as future-Queen-Consort Elizabeth, Michael Gambon as George V (King Dumbledore!), Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, and Guy Pearce as Edward VIII. And that only scratches the surface.

Just as impressive (but much less obtrusive) was the work of the backstage craft workers. Most of the set pieces took place in places like Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, or other London tourist landmarks; and the costumes were period-accurate in a way that made them almost unobtrusive. But most impressive was the makeup and hair, with the cast working as ringers for their roles. There will be well-deserved Oscar nominations here.

And as for the story - well, the major beats were predictable, the characters not particularly deep, and the whole thing reeked of the "Royals are people too!" vibe that is popular in British cinema these days. But nevertheless, even if the story was the weakest part of the movie, it was still compelling. Partially, this was because the dialogue itself was well-written (feeling like a stage play most of the time); but mostly, the movie thrived because the story was more-or-less non-fiction. The truth can aid even the biggest cliché.

For all of that, I'm still not entirely sure why the movie was packed. Doing some research online, it looks like this is not entirely unique - this movie holds the "highest gross per-theatre" title for 2010. And yes, it was a good movie, and a good start to my year's movies. But I doubt I'll ever run into that kind of crowd at an art theatre again.

Rating: 8/10 (*** 1/2 out of 4)