seriousfic

Hugh Jackman: Hello, movie audiences, and welcome to the far-flung future, where society has changed in ways you can scarcely begin to imagine!

The Future: There are windmills.

In the future, human boxing has been outlawed because it's unsafe. But robot boxing is cool, because regularly knocking chunks of heavy metal into the audience is perfectly safe.

Good ol' boy: Yeehaw!

Audience: There are good ol' boys in the future?

Good ol' boy: Boy-howdy!

Hugh Jackman: Is the audience supposed to take your character at all seriously? I've seen more subtle characterization at Punch & Judy shows.

Good ol' boy: Yippie-ki-yay!

Hugh Jackman: I guess stereotyping is only wrong when it happens to minorities.

Hugh Jackman's robot is set to fight an angry bull, since apparently in the future, we've outlawed boxing, but animal cruelty is just fine.

Hugh Jackman: So audience, I know it looks bad, me participating in the equivalent of a dogfight and then losing because I took a minute off from controlling my incredibly complicated robot to flirt with a girl, but don't worry, I have a heart of gold!

Hugh Jackman hears that his ex-girlfriend died, so as a deadbeat dad, he goes to the custody hearing for his eleven-year-old son and tells his brother-in-law that he can have custody of the kid for fifty thousand dollars.

Hugh Jackman: Oh, actually I'm a hateful prick who's also a complete idiot. But still, I was Wolverine!

Due to plot machinations, Hugh Jackman ends up with the annoying kid for the summer, but he'll give up custody in the fall, assuming he doesn't grow to care about the kid, as he clearly will. So, basically, this movie is ripping off the plot of Over The Top, the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling epic.

Kid: I want to go with my foster-parents to Italy, not stay here and participate in boring ol' shady underground robot fights!

Hugh Jackman: Too bad! I'm taking the money your parents gave me and buying a new fighting robot, which I'll then book against the champion before even familiarizing myself with the controls!

Kid: And I'm going to be in a scene reiterating that this was really stupid, even though the audience saw that for themselves.

Movie: Got that, audiences? Hugh Jackman's character flaw is overextending himself.

Kid: Well, we've found an old sparring robot, cleaned it up, and taken it to its first fight.

Evangeline Lilly: It's a generation two robot, from 2014.

Audience: So in three years, we're not only having fully anthropomorphic fighting robots, but two generations of them?

Evangeline Lilly: And boxing gym managers will look like Kate from Lost!

Punk from the 1980s, complete with mohawk and anarchy tattoo, since those will be around in the future: You can have a hundred dollars for a fight, or a thousand dollars, winner takes all!

Kid: Winner takes all!

Movie: So, uh, you shouldn't overextend yourself unless you're someone with the life experience to know when your confidence is well-placed. Like an eleven-year-old boy.

Hugh Jackman: My years of experience as a real boxer allow me to tell when a robot will attack before it does!

Audience: So, based on your experience with the human musculature, you can predict how robots, each vastly different from one another, will move?

Hugh Jackman: Sounds kinda stupid when you put it like that.

Controlled by the annoying kid, the robot goes on a winning streak. Because it takes a license to drive a car, but just about anyone can control a giant mechanical death machine. Based on their experience playing video games. ~~Which also teach kids Japanese, fuck this movie.~~

Hugh Jackman: Oh, and anthropomorphic robots can be controlled entirely by voice commands. Robot, take one step to the left! This is so much more efficient than every other form of control!

Kid: Hey, the robot's mimicking me! It can dance like I dance!

Audience: Please tell me this is a one-off joke and not a plot point.

Hugh Jackman: A robot dancing like a little kid would result in massive popularity, getting us a shot at the title! Just like viral marketing made Snakes On A Plane such an incredible hit!

Kid: And in the far future, eleven-year-olds will know about dance moves like The Robot.

Annoying kid and Hugh Jackman end up fighting for the official robot fighting league, not the criminal underground.

Audience: Wait, they were fighting in underground matches? Then were there all sorts of illegal modifications, like buzzsaws and flamethrowers?

Hugh Jackman: No, one robot just hit another robot in the groin.

Audience: ...ROBOTS DON'T HAVE GROINS.

After winning their very first professional match, annoying kid takes the movie's lesson about overextending yourself to heart and issues a challenge to the world champion.

Foreign woman: We own the champion robot and we never really do anything wrong, yet we're treated as evil. Why is that?

Japanese man: Well, you're an assertive woman and I'm Asian... I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Annoying kid: Why don't you face us in the ring, you snooty bitch!?

Then the good ol' boy who Hugh Jackman ripped off comes back for revenge.

Hugh Jackman: Oh, hey, I just won a fight so I clearly have the money I owe and am willing to pay.

Good ol' boy: Why should I care about getting my money back when I can commit a criminal act that will surely land me in prison if you simply call the police?

The good ol' boys beat Hugh Jackman up, since it's not like he has a giant killer robot at his beck and call.

Good ol' boy: Now everyone will know not to rip me off!

Hugh Jackman: I made the bet with you right before the match. The only way anyone could know that I ripped you off is if you told them.

Good ol' boy: Shuddup! I'm Texan, my actions don't have to make sense! The South will rise again!

This convinces Hugh Jackman that he's a bad father, and not the several weeks that he's been a bad father. He gives the annoying kid up to his relatives and goes to visit Evangeline Lilly.

Hugh Jackman: Women like it when their ex-boyfriends creep into their bedroom and get into bed with them, right?

Evangeline Lilly: Apparently so!

Hugh Jackman: Well, I haven't interacted with you at all since I've been on the road all this time and you have no real evidence that I've changed since you rejected my advances earlier, but I guess we're in love now.

Evangeline Lilly: Frankly, I think the audience is just glad that an Evangeline Lilly romance didn't last four fucking seasons like the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle.

Hugh Jackman goes back to pick up the kid and they go to fight Zeus, pitting the giant mech against the tiny sparring bot, since in the future, weight classes haven't been invented yet.

Good ol' boy: Ho shit, it's almost the end of the movie and I haven't gotten any comeuppance!

Hugh Jackman's black friend who exists to show that Hugh is "chill" with the "brothas" without having to give a black man a leading role: Howdy, pard'ner.

Good ol' boy: What's up, home-boy?

Hugh Jackman's black friend: How dare you nickname me according to an ethnic stereotype, like I just did to you! You can't do that to a minority!

Good ol' boy: It's the future. If population projections are correct, white people are now the minority.

Hugh Jackman's black friend: Just for that, I will dispense a random comeuppance to you!

The robots fight, with Zeus almost losing after running out of power.

Audience: How does the state-of-the-art world champion have less longevity than a primitive sparring robot?And robots aren't allowed to recharge between rounds? How is that fair? In fact, isn't it pretty much cheating? Atom didn't really outfight Zeus at all...

Hugh Jackman: No, see, it's like Rocky. When Rocky won but got cheated out of his victory so you'd see the sequel?

Audience: No, the point of Rocky was that Rocky could go the distance. His story was wrapped up at the end of the first film, the sequel was pretty much just shameless franchising. There was no overarching story to be told. Really, Warrior was a much better movie than this, since that film knew how to take the tropes of a boxing movie and rewrite them, since even the dumbest audience member knows the hero's going to win the fight. That's why it was so smart to make the climax about brotherly reconciliation instead of winning. This movie is just Rocky, but with robots and a cute kid and dancing and rap music, but not the kind of rap music that's about fucking the police. Bryant Gumbel rap music.

Hugh Jackman: Too bad, we're making a sequel anyway! About the mysterious origins of Atom. Don't you want to know how is it that Atom... never does anything out of the ordinary?

Audience: God no.

Hugh Jackman: Wait! Don't you want to know if Atom can beat Zeus?

Audience: He clearly can. And your character's relationship with his son is clearly resolved, there's no story left to tell, you're just dragging things out because Hollywood thinks every genre film should be a trilogy.

Hugh Jackman: That is not true. We also thought up a great title. Realer Steel!