“Real Steel” dresses up a bad idea — robots boxing — with all the computer effects and heavy-metal action that Hollywood can buy. But that doesn’t cover up the fact that it’s a bad idea. Really bad.

And “Real Steel” is a really bad movie, with some embarrassingly awful moments for Hugh Jackman.

Jackman’s Charlie Kenton is an ex-boxer scraping by in the near future as a promoter of brawling robots, which have taken over the sport from human fighters. Charlie’s on the seedy side of boxing, his secondhand ‘bots trading punches at fairgrounds and other unsanctioned venues while the big boys duke it out in televised fights at huge arenas.

A sleazebag who’s built a life on skipping out on his debts and responsibilities, Charlie suddenly finds himself on the road with his 11-year-old son, Max (Dakota Goyo), after the boy’s mother dies.

Short on cash and needing a new robot, Charlie heads to the junkyard to pilfer parts so he can piece together a new fighter. There, Max stumbles on Atom, an outdated sparring robot that turns out to be a diamond in the rough, a scrappy machine that becomes a sensation on the fight circuit.

From there, the drama as developed by screenwriter John Gatins and two others who share story credit goes just where you expect it to, without a ripple of surprise or originality. Father and son squawk and fight, find common ground and gradually make their way toward becoming a family, while Atom gets an underdog shot against the world champion.

It’s pretty nauseating, though not as nauseating as some of the images of Jackman shadow boxing outside the ring during the climactic match. He looks quite the fool doing it, capping an uneven performance in which Jackman generally is out-acted by the robots. Jackman is overly eager at the start to show how slimy Charlie is, and that makes the guy’s abrupt transformation into father-of-the-year material all the more unconvincing.

Goyo overdoes it, too, his earnestness growing tiresome and eventually cloying by the time Max becomes a ringside idol himself for his dance routines alongside Atom.

None of the humans have anything interesting to do. The robots are the stars. Life-size versions of some robots were built for the actors to perform with, while the fight scenes were created using human boxers whose movements were digitally recorded as the basis for the computer-animated robots’ motions.

The filmmakers took the basic idea of robot boxers from a short story by “I Am Legend” author Richard Matheson, which previously was made into an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

The only advancement “Real Steel” brings is production values. Hollywood robots have come a long way since that quaint old black-and-white show. Storytelling, not so much.