&lt;div class=&quot;track&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.22.2/57417?ns=guardian&amp;pageName=Real+Steel+*+review%3AArticle%3A1646841&amp;ch=Film&amp;c3=Guardian&amp;c4=Hugh+Jackman+%28Film%29%2CAction+and+adventure+%28Film+genre%29%2CThriller+%28Film+genre%29%2CScience+fiction+and+fantasy+%28Film+genre%29%2CFilm%2CCulture&amp;c5=Not+commercially+useful%2CFilm+Reviews&amp;c6=Peter+Bradshaw&amp;c7=11-Oct-13&amp;c8=1646841&amp;c9=Article&amp;c10=Review&amp;c11=Film&amp;c13=&amp;c25=&amp;c30=content&amp;h2=GU%2FFilm%2FHugh+Jackman&quot; width=&quot;1&quot; height=&quot;1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;p class=&quot;standfirst&quot;&gt;There&#039;s too much schmaltz and not enough smashes in this cyborg slugfest&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sentimental sci-fi really is a very worrying genre. And like a horrendous combination of Joe Bugner and WALL-E, the star of this film is a great big boxing robot, a tin man with a lot of heart. He&#039;s called Atom, and as Harry Carpenter might have put it: what a gutsy, unassuming automaton Atom is. He&#039;s been discovered in a junkyard by Charlie Kenton, played by Hugh Jackman, a washed-up robot trainer and ex-fighter who in this bland futureworld coaches souped-up &#039;bots to bash the jeepers out of each other. You can tell he&#039;s supposed to be washed up, incidentally, because in the first scene he drinks half-finished bottles of warm beer on tumbling out of bed &ndash; and after that, of course, never touches another drop.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;A quirk of fate means he has to look after his adorable tousle-haired kid Max (Dakota Goyo) from a previous relationship. What happened to mom you ask? She&#039;s dead. How? Who cares? Certainly not Max &ndash; who never shows the smallest interest in the subject of his mother. He believes in his dad. And he believes in this feisty battling robot they&#039;re putting together. It&#039;s a boy&#039;s-own-men&#039;s-own fantasy and together, these all-American underdog guys take their robot all the way to the robot-boxing final where they take on a slick &uuml;ber-bot invented and managed by Tak Mashido and Ferra Lemkova: a suspect Japanese-type foreigner and an unappealing thin-faced witch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But look, what on earth is the point of a specially-trained robot that doesn&#039;t get a mind of its own and turn, chillingly, on its human masters? Atom is just a little creep and suckup, a Vichyite collaborator, a disgrace to the dystopian tradition. It&#039;s as if HAL in 2001 had been reprogrammed with the audiobook of Dale Carnegie&#039;s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Director Shawn Levy risks a few lingering shots on Atom, alone, but we cut quickly away, as if to reassure the audience that Atom isn&#039;t going to go off message in any way at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What we really needed was a robot-on-human sparring session which ended with Atom getting overexcited and ripping off Hugh Jackman&#039;s left leg and beating him over the head with it. And then he could drink the rest of Hugh&#039;s untouched lagers and drive off to a motel with a female robot to smoke crack and clankingly disobey the no-sex-before-a-fight rule.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&#039;s an incredibly cynical movie, written and acted by robots, and boasting the most flagrant piece of product-placement for a certain soft drink. It needs hardly to be said that the real robot is the kid himself: the little boy who is stubborn one minute and sweetly vulnerable the next. Oh, how beseechingly he looks at his dad. &quot;Are you kidding me with those eyes?&quot; asks Charlie. Yes. They come out on spikes, attached to beeping diodes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class=&quot;rating&quot;&gt;Rating: 1/5&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;related&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;&quot;&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/hugh-jackman&quot;&gt;Hugh Jackman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/actionandadventure&quot;&gt;Action and adventure&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/thriller&quot;&gt;Thriller&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/sciencefictionandfantasy&quot;&gt;Science fiction and fantasy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;author&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/peterbradshaw&quot;&gt;Peter Bradshaw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;terms&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk&quot;&gt;guardian.co.uk&lt;/a&gt; &amp;copy; 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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