Mecha Talk

The plot is pretty straightforward standard fare, so I won't bother going over it too much. Long story short: a down-on-his-luck robot boxer teams up with his estranged son to enter into robot boxing matches and beat the living crap out of anybody who stands in their way. Well, not at first -- Hugh Jackman gets his ass kicked a lot at first, mostly thanks to his cockiness and sheer overconfidence before and during his fights. Fortunately for him, he manages to grow out of it later.

I give the plot props, since it doesn't waste a whole lot of time with anything unrelated to Max and Hugh Jackman's journey through their matches. Max comes off as kind of a little prick at first, but once you realize that Hugh Jackman's own attitude isn't all that much better, you see that they make a pretty good match. I actually ended up really enjoying their development as they grew closer to one another, and it made for a pretty decent story overall.

Meanwhile, the whole angle surrounding the robot underdog, Atom, was pretty much ripped straight from the first Rocky movie, but I didn't mind at all because, dammit, they replaced Rocky with a seven-foot-tall boxing robot, what heck isn't there to love about that? What I found particularly interesting was the fact that Atom wasn't built as a boxing robot, but rather a sparring robot. This meant that he couldn't hit very hard, but was designed to take a lot of hits and could move quickly, which gave him a means to fight against bigger robots designed to deliver damaging blows. There was also this thing throughout the movie where they seemed to be implying that Atom was actually alive(?) but I decided not to think about it too much, since it gave them an excuse for the exciting scenes where after being knocked down, Max would shout for Atom to get back up and, holy crap, the little robot freaking got back up!

The action, thank the Gods, doesn't suffer at all from Transformer's infamous "Can't-See-Shit Syndrome". All of the fights were really fast-paced and hard-hitting, and most of the robots were highly unique and individual, so there was absolutely no lack of excitement to be found there. My favorite robot of the movie, to my surprise, actually ended up being the Atom. I wasn't all that enthused when I first saw glimpses of him in the trailers, since I figured (and accurately surmised) that it'd be yet another case of "a boy and his robot" with him and Max. However -- in addition to all the things mentioned in the above paragraph -- once he started showing up jerks and beating the ever-loving out of robots nearly twice his size, I just couldn't help but adore him. Though that's not to say that I didn't love any of the other robots that showed up; I nearly jizzed in my pants when Hugh Jackman brought Noisy Boy out of the shipping crate, his design was so cool. Needless to say, I was highly disappointed/outraged when Hugh Jackman allowed him to be beaten to hell in his first fight. Rest in pieces, Noisy Boy. You will be missed. =( In the end, the only robot I didn't care for too much was the champion Zeus, if only because his design, while intimidating, was also pretty boring (though he did have piston-punch arms, which was kinda cool.)