Real Steel (2011)

This is a movie that owes a lot to movies that have gone before it. Atom is a very endearing junk yard robot (think Wall-E), fighting against highly engineered robots (so he is the proverbial underdog, something that you can root for without feeling devastated if he loses). The robots remind me of what I would have hoped the Transformer movie could have gotten a little better. They talk less and express more. I wasn't irritated by them, which is always a plus when watching something that is ostensibly for entertainment. Wrap that up with an out of luck former boxer who can't seem to break a losing streak, and the son he abandoned before he was born coming back to have a 'Paper Moon' kind of father-child relationship. So what redeems this movie from being a mere retread of other fight movies that have been done before? The action is quite well done without being crazy violent (so you could have younger boys see it). Kids will love it--the fighting will be awesome and there is a romantic back story and a father coming to fall in love with a child he never really knew or valued that will keep the interest of the non-fighters in the family. The language is not super clean, and there is some grittiness that the most protective of parents would find objectionable, but I think this is a pretty good family movie for mid-grammar school on up.