To deter­mine if you will enjoy Real Steel, you need to ask your­self: Just how much do you enjoy big robots punch­ing each other? Are you will­ing to watch Hugh Jack­man and some kid (okay, a kid named Dakota Goyo) do the robot (with a robot!) and occa­sion­ally cry? Can you sit through a dozen “inspi­ra­tional” mon­tages accom­pa­nied by tear­ful gui­tar pluckin’? If you can sur­vive all that, you’ll find Real Steel per­fectly inof­fen­sive, and the robot-punching gen­uinely exciting.

Real Steel starts with Char­lie (Jack­man), a washed up robo-boxer (and ex-normal boxer),looking for a new robot to make him some money in the ring. He ends up get­ting stuck with his 11-year-old son, Max, who Char­lie aban­doned as a baby. Max finds an old robot named Atom in a junk­yard and together. Char­lie and Max start mak­ing a name for them­selves but have to con­tend with Charlie’s seedy past and Max’s aunt, eager to gain full cus­tody of Max and pro­tect him from Charlie.

Real Steel is, at its core, a clas­sic box­ing movie. It has sev­eral train­ing and fight­ing mon­tages, and Char­lie hits rock bot­tom at least twice before they get a shot at the title. Finally, it has not one but two stereo­typ­i­cal for­eign antag­o­nists (a Russ­ian per­son AND a Japan­ese per­son) who are so typ­i­cally evil it’s funny. Even their robot looks evil. This is a sim­ple movie with a pre­dictable feel-good plot, but in this case it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. It’s still awe­some when scrappy lil’ Atom beats the big­ger, tougher bots. How­ever, the parts where robots aren’t punch­ing are just drip­ping with sap. It’s hard to take any char­ac­ter seri­ously when they’re all con­stantly launch­ing into elab­o­rate box­ing sto­ries, or talk­ing about how Atom really has feel­ings. Make no mis­take: the robot fight scenes are awe­some, but they occupy only a small part of this two-hour movie.

The robots them­selves look pretty cool, with some pretty con­vinc­ing CGI, and the future set­ting is down­played to the point that the only things dif­fer­ent in the future are bet­ter lap­tops and cell phones and the pres­ence of giant robots (although Sprint’s still around judg­ing from the prod­uct placement).

So I guess the core ques­tion view­ers need to ask is how much sap you’re able to swal­low. If the action in the Trans­form­ers movies was enough for you to ignore the other two hours of movie in those, then you’ll prob­a­bly enjoy Real Steel. But if you have more refined taste, maybe you should keep enjoy­ing your wine and cheese and skip this robopunchingfest.