A-X-L (2018)

I watched this with my youngest son, who is on a stint of watching bad action movies, of which this is one.  This is not what I would call a good movie.  It has all the elements of stereotype that you can squish into an hour and a half.  The taleneted young dirt bike stunt racer is poor and has trouble competing with the over resourced boy, but the rich kid has an overbearing father, so no winners there.  The rich kid is a total jerk, taking pleasure in controling the other kids in his sphere, making them choose between becoming like him and doing the right thing.  The rich kid pines for the house cleaners daughter, and she is the only one who stands up to him, but even that comes at a price.
The plot that is overlaid on this well worn story line is that a private company is developing a battlefield robot in the form of a dog, man's best friend for the modern soldier (so a version of Small Soldiers, where the corporation loses control of their weapon, which has to be brought back under cover at any cost).   The only reason that I bother to write about it at all is that I think that it is definitely a notch above the Transformer movies.  And while there is a fair amount of bullying and a couple of people shot, as these things go it is not too violent when all is said and done.