Dude, have you SEEN what passes for 8 year old entertainment? I found it enjoyable if only because I didn’t need to go screaming from the theatre with my eyes bleeding.
(Google Beyblade…Pokemon…Suite life on deck…if you dare!)
Can’t argue the point! 
That’s why I loved stuff like the Iron Giant, most Pixar movies, The PowerPuff Girls, heck, even iCarly (Suite Life sucks giant donkey balls, to be sure…).
I saw your point.. I didn’t agree with it. Boxing has rules right? Why? Because there are humans fighting. If the idea was the artifice of keeping it as close to traditional boxing as possible.. then why were the bots allowed to tear each other up. I could be mis-remembering but doesn’t Zeus totally destroy an opponent in the ring? Basically murdering an opponent? Why are there rules about hitting below the belt… for robots? “Because then it’s not boxing.”–it’s NOT boxing anyway so why bother?
If they wanted it to just be boxing–with robots wouldn’t there be a more standardized design and a standardized control (Zeus was basically an AI with a human controller there to just keep watch).
I think there were several nuggets placed throughout to do a sequel exploring where Atom came from.
I thought they’d come up in the movie but didn’t.
This was basically my point. There are ways they could’ve laid out the parameters, but didn’t, so the rules seemed a bit all over the place. No biggie - ultimately it was trying to be a kid’s movie and it was…
Um. You may not have long to wait. There’s already the Battleship movie (warning! flash starts playing). And this article about Transformers 4 and Micronauts** mentions additional Hasbro films Ouija**, Candyland, Risk, Stretch Armstrong, Clue**** and Monopoly.
I think Mousetrap can’t be far behind…
- Really worth watching the trailer, just for the eye-roll worthiness. Saw it in a theater and we all cracked up.
** Micronauts! MICRONAUTS!!! whee!!!
*** Apparently got it’s funding cut, though.
**** Remake, maybe? Dunno.
Almost fifteen years ago, there was a comedy film starring Nathan Lane called Mouse Hunt. It was sort of a live action version of Mousetrap.
I wouldn’t say the movie is good so much as that it ends wonderfully.
As WordMan points out, the movie is pretty classic kid-movie, with the kid acting as the protagonist and getting away with things that no adult (let alone the one we’re supposed to expect Hugh Jackman to be) would ever let him get away with. The adult character seems to be an afterthought, with no particular explanation for why he’s such a deadbeat nor why he’s so bad at his chosen profession, that you sort of ignore him. Nor do they develop the kid at all. He’s just magical, end of story.
Basically, for the first 3/4ths of the movie, it’s so cookie cutter, poorly written, and characterized that you lower your expectations enough that once Hugh actually puts his acting chops to work and sells you on his conversion, the movie really takes off and kicks ass, pulling at your heart strings marvelously – but perhaps only because your expectations have been lowered so much by that point. Preceeded by a better acted, better written movie, but still constrained to the tropes of a summer kid-as-hero movie rules, I don’t think it would have been as good.
But ultimately, it’s how you feel at the end that matters. I was happy with the results.
Like Wordman, I agree it was one cliche strung after another, with scenes, motifs, themes that have been done a million times before. However, I also agree that it was much better than I expected from the previews and that ones enjoyment of the movie is greatly enhanced by viewing it with a kid who is watching The Coolest Thing Ever (with me, it was my 10yo daughter who also had two stuffed animals with her). Sophie’s seen enough movies so that even she knew what was coming up next (a couple of times I would ask “Do they win this fight?” and she would know as well as I did (and given there were only 5 people in the theater, don’t give me shit for whispering during the movie! 
))
And, bizarrely, I think the product placement was done pretty well in the context of the movie. There’s a scene where the kid has drunk a lot of Dr. Pepper’s and you see the cans, but the product placement never was intrusive until the Big Fights (featuring the robo-boxing equivalent of the NFL), where logos were everywhere: Sprint, Coca-Cola, Bing(!?), Citibank, etc… but since one expects to see tons of logos in modern American sporting events, they actually added verisimilitude to the film and weren’t as distracting as one would think beforehand (I don’t think they’ve been complained about in this thread, for example).
Microsoft’s not-Google.
Oh, I know… the main fight took place at Bing Sports Arena, which is a rather pricy thing to sponsor for a third-place search engine. 
Forget the holes in the story line and the familiar plot, this movie had fighting robots with incredible moves! First rate CGI and some very cool robots! I mean, Noisy Boy? How cool was he when he came bursting out of the crate? I immediately wanted one. And Zeus? Totally entertaining! Even the ring announcers were very good at their assigned tasks. The Japanese guy and the Russian sponsor, all fun to watch. Even the remote control boxes were very well designed for effect.
I don’t care that the kid was a little too smart or the dad’s behavior was slightly unrealistic. I tell ya, that robot that Atom was fighting in the zoo was way cool with his funny moves and expressions. I even liked the over-the-top, mohawked zoo entrepreneur. He was good, and funny.
The movie was entertaining as hell and that’s all it was meant to be. I’ll be buying the Blu Ray when it comes out and I’m 61.
Well what do you expect from someone who squeezes trout? 
Precisely.
Squeezes… trout?
What the heck is that?
Look at the fella’s username 
How the hell else are you supposed to get trout juice? A Bass-o-Matic? That’s fine for bass, but sucks for trout.
My friends’ 10-year-old son wants to see it, and so do I, but his dad’s not into it so I’ve been thinking about just taking him myself: I know it’s PG-13, but was wondering if there was anything really not good for a 10-year-old in it. I guess not. I hope it’s still in theaters this coming weekend!
It just sounds like a euphemism for masturbation. Just sayin’. And I can’t tell from the context the meaning of the phrase. Unless the joke is the complete non-sequetor of the sentence, then I gots whooshed.
I think there’s one or two “shits” but that is it.
Jackman and Evangeline Lily even have a pretty chaste romance.
You’re thinking of the trouser trout. Different species.