Lilly and Jackman.

For a superstar with unbelievable looks, charm, versatility and range, it is positively astounding how much time and energy Hugh Jackman wastes on mediocre movies. So from the previews, I dreaded Real Steel. An action flick about boxing robots? I made plans to be out of town. Well, I guess there’s no fool like an old fool. I have seen Real Steel. Get ready. It is exciting, palpitating, surprisingly fresh, action-packed, double-barreled dynamite.

In a futuristic time zone where everything looks like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Mr. Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a scruffy, drunken roustabout who used to be a boxer before the public got tired of watching re-runs of Fight Club and replaced humans in the ring with million-dollar monolithic robots pounding each other to scrap metal. Once a promising pugilist, Charlie fell on hard times with the rising popularity of the new sport called “robot boxing” that replaced men with machines. Ten years later, his ex-wife dies suddenly, leaving him with a son named Max he has never met, and the irresponsible Charlie, reduced to grifting his way through the county fair circuit promoting fights between robots and 800-pound bulls, finds himself at the end of his rope, broke and saddled with a kid he doesn’t want. The boy’s aunt (the always wonderful Hope Davis) wants to adopt Max, so Charlie sells him secretly to her rich husband for $100,000, taking half the money up front to invest in parts for a new robot. The condition is that he must take custody of the kid until the relatives return from their vacation at the end of the summer. What happens next owes more than a little to both Frankenstein, as the man-made creatures take on lives of their own, and the Wallace Beery-Jackie Cooper classic The Champ, as father and son learn to bond, the kid becomes a partner and a helpmate, his dad grows up, and everyone turns into a better person. There is also a grown-up love story between Charlie, who treats people with the same disregard as he shows his robots, and Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), the daughter of the man who used to be Charlie’s trainer in the boxing ring, and a girl who ekes out a living designing robots.

Make no mistake. I was rooting for the robots. Operated by a command matrix in a remote-control box that looks like a sci-fi version of the iPhone, they steal the picture. Like the horse puppets in the Broadway show War Horse (soon to be a movie by Steven Spielberg), they have individual personalities and compete for attention like golden retrievers. First, there’s a killer called Noisy Boy, a World Robot League champion who gets demolished in its first fight, losing Charlie his entire investment. Then Max, who becomes obsessed with the sport, rescues a discarded robot from a junkyard, refurbishes it from rusty metal pieces of other robots, names it Atom, and teaches it to dance, giving the crowd an extra comedy element. Max teaches Atom rhythm, Charlie teaches him to box, and it’s a robot career on the rise. The owners of Zeus, the undefeated robot king, are impressed enough with Atom’s early matches to offer $200,000 to make it a sparring partner for Zeus, which would solve Charlie’s financial problems, but the kid refuses to sell. It’s inevitable where this is leading­—the junkyard underdog must eventually have to face the terrifying Zeus in the Real Steel Championship fight in New York City.

O.K., so the target audience for Real Steel is 12-year-old boys who love video games. They won’t give a hoot about the romantic subplot, or how Charlie gets his mojo back. But director Shawn Levy, writer John Gatins and those animatronic robots guarantee nonstop action, danger and suspense. The final bout, with Mr. Jackman feeding every move to the dazed Atom by shadow boxing while the crowd goes wild, is every bit as exciting as any fight scene ever captured on film. As terrific as Mr. Jackman is, he is matched scene for scene by Dakota Goyo, a young actor who is going places. Real Steel is so not my kind of movie that I am still pinching myself. Hard to believe I liked it as much as I did. Like Moneyball, this is real movie making that packs a solid entertainment punch, proving it doesn’t matter what the genre is if genuinely talented and dedicated people are pulling the strings instead of hacks.

rreed@observer.com

REAL STEEL

Running Time 127 minutes

Written by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven

Directed by Shawn Levy

Starring Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly and Dakota Goyo

3/4

A few years back, Christopher Kwiatkowski arrived at a work meeting in Manhattan and drew prolonged stares. Mr. Kwiatkowski had a broken nose and two black eyes.

“It looked as if I had been in a bar brawl and I had to address the issue right away,” recalled the 39-year-old real estate pro, who specializes in high-end condos and hotels. “I told them, ‘I am a kick boxer and I had a fight last night.’” Eventually, someone asked how he had fared against his opponent. “Very well, I knocked him out.”

Just last week, Mr. Kwiatkowski, whose nickname is the Polish Punisher, was preparing for his latest bout against a fighter from Utah—a 20-year-old named Oliver Parker who was literally in diapers when Mr. Kwiatkowski was his age.

In preparation for his fight, he was fasting (in order to make weight) and inspecting a penthouse in one of the properties that he has helped develop, the newly built Beatrice on West 29th Street. He showed me into a spacious bathroom with floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Nice, eh?” he remarked proudly.  “You can sit on the pot and have an excellent view of the East River.” Inspecting the inside of a medicine cabinet, Mr. Kwiatkowski noted with disapproval an exposed screw head, and remarked that this was simply unacceptable in a $23,000-a-month apartment.

He lamented that in order to get quality he sometimes felt as if he had to “babysit” the contractors, but then added happily, “That’s where being a fighter helps—your bark has more bite.”

The following evening, well over a thousand people jammed themselves inside the cavernous basement of an old building in midtown Manhattan to see Mr. Kwiatkowski’s fight. The room was very hot. Fans stood shoulder to shoulder, fanning themselves and shouting into one another’s ears over the pounding thud of hip-hop.

The event was part of the Friday Night Fights series, which showcases Muay Thai fighters, like Mr. Kwiatkowski. Muay Thai is a less genteel form of boxing that allows fighters to punch, kick, knee and elbow; there are only a few concessions to civility: biting, for instance, isn’t allowed. “It is the brain injuries that you have to worry about,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Especially in my line of work, where you have to use your brain.”

The crowd at the fight was an unlikely mix of well-groomed professionals in businesswear, bespectacled rock ‘n’ rollers, and tattooed toughs in shirts sans sleeves. Many of the suits worked in real estate and had come to root for Mr. Kwiatkowski.

Kevin Lillis, an executive at Hampshire Hotels & Resorts, occasionally organizes large real estate “networking events” around Mr. Kwiatkowski’s fights. Mr. Lillis explained, “It is not like watching Derek Jeter on TV—Chris is in our industry. So we come out for him, and when he wins, we win.”

Scott Sambade, another real estate developer, added exuberantly, “You support the people you go into battle with—and Chris does battle in the real estate world!”

Mr. Kwiatkowski’s female fans offered a slightly different perspective. “In real estate, there are a lot of guys who talk, but can’t back it up,” explained Marisa Morabito, who specializes in deficient loans at MetLife. “Chris, however, can back it up.”

As she was talking, a fight got underway in which one young woman, who sported a short-cropped Afro, was ferociously punching the face of the other young woman, who had long blond hair and was fast coming to resemble a gorey Rapunzel. “Where do these girls learn to do this?” asked Ms. Morabito with awe.

Finally, after a number of warm-up bouts, Mr. Kwiatkowski took the stage with much fanfare. The haunting and ethereal sound of a Pi Java—or Javanese clarinet—could be heard as traditional Muay Thai music blasted from the loudspeakers. He then began a ritual dance in which he circled the ring, sealing off the space to keep evil spirits at bay. Mr. Kwiatkowski’s mother, a petite woman who sat near the front row, looked on proudly and remarked, “Look at what he is doing—he is psyching out his opponent!”

Several seats away, the celebrated tattoo artist and reality TV star Chris Torres noted that “if your mom is coming to watch you beat someone up, you got to be doing something right.”

Moments later, the bell went off and Mr. Parker, who appeared very strong, if slightly less skilled, charged  trying to back the older man into a corner in order to pummel him—but Mr. Kwiatkowski repeatedly fended him off. “Come on, baby!” yelled one of his fans. “Hit him in his fucking face, baby!” Eventually, he did manage to do just that and, after four rounds of hard fighting, the judges unanimously declared him the winner.

Mr. Kwiatkowski’s supporters were exuberant. “It was not a slug fest,” opined one of the real estate boosters. “It was a real chess match.”

Others marveled that their man was successful both as a fighter and as a real estate developer. There were, however, plenty in attendance that evening who had no idea what the Polish Punisher did for work. This included his opponent, the young Oliver Parker, who, upon learning the news prior to the fight, seemed pleasantly surprised.

“That is kind of amusing,” he remarked. “I will have to talk to him later about a house.”

editorial@observer.com

Anthony Haden-Guest, the fighter, at The Standard.

Consummate party-goer and writer Anthony Haden-Guest stood on the deck of The Standard last night having just seen the premiere of The Shoe, Andre Saraiva's sex-filled Parisian romp with a slight footwear fetish. He was drinking a glass of red wine. It was, The Observer noted, not his first of the night.

"Let's go up to the party!" he said, gesturing toward the other end of the balcony. The celebration was set to continue at Le Bain, the top-floor spot Mr. Saraiva had opened with Andre Balazs last summer, still going strong a year later.

"It's such a mess out here, though," The Observer responded. In order to get to an elevator we had to direct the 74-year-old Mr. Haden-Guest through a vast and tightly packed crowd, dodging half the art world and half-drunk fashion kids.

Not going to happen. So Mr. Haden-Guest grabbed a rolled-up poster for the film and started thrashing at the men and women ahead of him. The Observer followed dutifully. And as he smashed into the shocked onlookers, jabbing at them with the makeshift sword, the clearing begrudgingly began to form.

"Who is this guy?" said a woman holding a cocktail.

"It's all right," said her companion. "He's a successful writer."

By the time we reached Le Bain, Mr. Haden-Guest had ditched his Excalibur and began dancing wildly, all jerky wonderful motions that would get anyone with less cache kicked out of the place, or at least mocked. Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of The King's Speech, stood by the bar, watching. He couldn't even eke out a stutter.

Shortly thereafter Mr. Haden-Guest challenged The Observer to fight. We accepted, of course.

"Do you box?" he asked us.

"Not really," we said.

"I used to be a boxer," he said. "I trained with the greatest."

He said the trainer's name. We didn't recognize it.

"All right, let's go!" he said.

The Observer put up two fists and hopped around Mr. Haden-Guest, who was just as nimble in the ring as he was on the dance floor. Unfortunately, the ring in this case was the strip next to Le Bain's indoor hot tub. After a bit of sparring and some light touches to the chest there's a flash and a slight pain in The Observer's nose. It turns out Anthony Haden-Guest has a mean left hook.

"You see that?" he said to us. "You let your guard down."

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman raised some eyebrows during a routine conference this week when he threatened to "personally escort" [out] anyone found leaking any details of the firm's compensation levels to the media, The Post has learned.

Gorman, who has been pushing hard to keep the lid on bonuses and has railed against the superstar mentality on Wall Street, unexpectedly read the riot act to about 500 managing directors during the usually staid year-end conference call, according to sources familiar with the call.

The Post also says Mr. Gorman has taken up boxing since assuming the CEO position at Morgan Stanley. This certainly helps his chances in a fight against an insubordinate employee, but also raises an important question. Who would win in a fight: Gorman the pugilist or former rugby player, "hand-to-hand combat" enthusiast and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan?

Meet the Newest Ultra-Rich Givers.>>

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

Only Little Paulie doesn’t see that way. He wants the world to know his name.

Mr. Malignaggi, 27, has come a long way from throwing dice and cutting class at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst—starting with a pair of Golden Gloves in ’98—but the fact that everyone from back in the day had bet on him losing still weighs on him something awful. It’s the reason he decided to wear his hair in dreadlocks on fight night back in May. Manchester Stadium, 56,000 crazed soccer blokes turned out to see hometown hero Hitman Hatton duke it out with Juan Lazcano. The Magic Man, filling the undercard slot, was defending his title against the man he took it from the year before, South African slugger Lovemore N’dou.

Mr. Malignaggi came out dancing, shimmying the shoulders, shadow-boxing and shaking around the giant mop on his head. Here I am! he was trying to say.

“I’ve always colored my hair and come up with weird hairdos,” said Paulie before biting into a “Champion Slice,” made with lasagna sauce and named in his honor, at his favorite pizzeria, Portobello’s in Tribeca, a few Saturdays ago. “It’s about letting people know I’m here. I had it tough getting here.”

He was born in New York but soon after moved to Sicily, where his dad was trying to make it as a pro soccer player. His parents split when Paulie was 6, and his mother took him to Brooklyn. They had it rough. Sometimes crackers were all there was for dinner. Mama remarried, to a bully who liked to push Paulie around. Eventually they had a fight and he was sent to live with his grandparents. After he was expelled from high school for fighting, grandpa walked him over to Gleason’s Gym.

“A lot of people didn’t believe in me,” Mr. Malignaggi said.

He won the Manchester bout in a split decision, but in a tragic turn of events, his weave stole the show. The damn ties kept coming out. Fake hair was flopping in his eyes when N’dou rocked him with two big right hands in the seventh. His trainer Bobby McGirt gave Paulie a quick trim between rounds. Brooklyn pretty boy suffers hairdo malfunction—the Brit crowd ate it up!

“It got a bit out of hand,” Mr. Malignaggi said.

There will be no braids when he comes out of the tunnel on Nov. 22 at MGM Grand, but maybe he’ll pull out the platinum Mohawk he sported while mopping the mat with N’dou the first time. Paulie loves fashion and he’s not afraid to admit it. 

“But now that I’m grown up, I like the trendy look … flashy jewelry.” He gestured at the rope of diamonds around his neck and the giant diamond watch on his wrist. “I like the classier look. Dressier sneakers, shoes, button downs …”

He’s done some modeling, dressing up for Details and Esquire and ad campaigns. “I’m very confident in my looks,” Mr. Malignaggi said. “I have no problems with the opposite sex, believe me. I am very confident in my sexuality. I have no problem modeling. I know I’m a fighter. I have nothing against homosexuals. I’m not saying I’m against them, but I’m saying the masculine part of me shouldn’t be confused.

“It’s all part of the package,” he continued. “I like to be an entertainer.”

He said the American boxing world gives its young stars short shrift, doesn’t promote them enough, and that’s why he’s working overtime with the hair and the antics (he’s been know to attend other matches and steal the spotlight by starting a scene). He’s currently deciding between Lil’ Wayne’s “In the Game” and Swiss Beats’ “Where the Cash at” for his ring entrance theme song, but he might change things up and go with something ’80s (he’s been loving Journey lately).

But aside from all the froufrou, Mr. Malignaggi just wants to be a world champion. His first title shot came in June of ’06, against the undefeated Miguel Cotto. In the first round, Mr. Cotto broke the kid’s right orbital bone—that’s the eye socket. By the end of the fight the eye was streaming blood and swelled up like a grapefruit, but he was still standing when the bell rang at the end of the 12th. Took it like a man, congratulated the better fighter, said he’d be back, then went to his locker room, burst into tears and crumpled to the floor.

“When the bell rings, I’m not feeling my looks anymore,” Mr. Malignaggi said. “I’m thinking about achieving the task at hand. It’s almost an animal instinct. You have to survive the proper way, to win. When the fight is over, obviously, yeah, I do look in the mirror. When I broke my orbital bone, that wasn’t too cool. I had to get surgery to repair it, and at first it looked like I had a droopy eye. I had to get used to the metal in my face, because I have some titanium here,” he said, indicating his right eye socket. “If I told you I didn’t think about how my face is slightly changed now, I’d be lying to you because I do.”

After the dreadlock debacle, he had a cast on his right hand for six weeks. When people would ask him how it happened, he’d say “long story.”

He keeps to himself and his entourage: best friend, Pete Sferazza, who was his driver this afternoon and was looking on from a nearby table; “adviser” Anthony Catanzano, who owns the joint; brother, Umberto; and cousin Sal.

Later, while Mr. Malignaggi was mugging for photographs, Mr. Sferazza told me that they met way back when at Gleason’s. “We’ve been like this since the beginning,” he said. “He’s a loyal guy.” Paulie’s gal of two years is named Francesca. She’s a good kid, honest and beautiful, he said. “Everything you could want from a girlfriend she has. I try to be someone she can trust, but sometimes it has become difficult.” He gets a lot of attention from girls at the clubs where he likes to go, in Chelsea and the meatpacking district. Sometimes he gets attention from guys. Some poor fool will call him a “preppy” or a “pretty boy” or “bridge and tunnel” and wind up on the floor, begging for mercy.

“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t get in a lot of fights. I know what I’m capable of,” Mr. Malignaggi said. “But because I know what I’m capable of, I’m not going to start fights, but I’m not going to let you walk all over me, either. I won’t let you talk down to me or anything like that.”

A man, he said, ought to stand up for what he believes in.

A month back, he was playing cards at a friend’s house out in Bensonhurst. The fellow sitting next to him started acting like a big shot—tried to make a special rule that no one was allowed to talk when he was in a hand. Mr. Tough Guy. Paulie said people were allowed to say whatever they want, but all nonchalant-like. The man stood up and hovered over Paulie, who is still pretty little at 5-foot-7, 140 pounds.

“He gets over me like this,” he said, and puffed out his chest like King Kong. “I start punching the shit out of him. I break his glasses. He tries to be a big shot and he ends up looking stupid. Why? Because there’s no place to be a big shot. So you get into these situations.”

Don’t get him wrong—he’s found a few other things to believe in, other than defending his honor like he used to back in the schoolyard, but that’s part of it.

“When you don’t take your responsibilities as seriously as you should, you’re not a full-grown man,” Mr. Malignaggi said. “You can’t be a 30-year-old boy. A man has a lot of those two qualities: Not afraid to stand up for his values and morals, and a responsible person.”

He was headed to Vegas training camp in a few days.

“I want to be successful,” Paulie said. “Because growing up, I was lacking a lot of the things that we wanted. So I want to be in a situation where I’m set financially and respected as a man because I’ve achieved my goals and gone through whatever I need to achieve them.

“Boxing is not an easy career to do,” he went on, “but there’s no price I’m not willing to pay to be a success at this, and I’m achieving that little by little, But I’m not where I want to be now, you know, I want to reach for the sky, reach for the stars. When you reach for them, you can’t actually reach them, obviously. You always keep trying.”

smorgan@observer.com