I know I shouldn't be so hard on Shawn Levy, but it's infuriating when there's a director in Hollywood who's so successful and has no ability whatsoever.  I'm not talking about journeyman directors who don't have a particular style or clear artistic drive.  Levy is a director who can have a budget and an army of talented actors and still come out with a crushingly mediocre film that snuffs out imagination rather than kindles it.

So when I read about how he wants to make his upcoming robot boxing movie Real Steel to Rocky, I'm not encouraged.  Hit the jump to read his confident yet astonishingly non-sensical ideas for his movie.

With Hugh Jackman attached to star, Real Steel is about a guy down-on-his luck who works in robot boxing sports and takes one last shot at the title while re-connecting with this son.  So it's Rocky, not Transformers, got it?!  This is a serious movie demanding to be taken seriously.  Shawn Levy wants us to know that his robots will be nothing like the ones from successful franchises.  Here's what Levy had to say to SCI FI Wire:

"They are most definitely not Transformers, not Terminators, definitely not WALL-Es, either," Levy said. "Unlike a lot of these others, these are human-built, human-scale fighting machines. They are built for human spectacle. People in this movie have gotten bored with human carnage and human violence. So in the quest for more, more, more, this sport has evolved to this."

So let me get this straight, Mr. Levy: these people make human-scale robot fighting machines because they're bored with human carnage and human violence.  I don't quite understand how robots are a step up from that.  If a robot destroys another robot in the ring, how is that exciting?  Maybe if you were talking about a Truckasaurus vs. Truckzilla match up but replacing humans with human-sized robots is like replacing someone's expensive steak dinner with a TV dinner and saying that the TV dinner tastes better.  If this quest for carnage were true, Battlebots would not only still be on the air, but it would be one of TV's highest rated shows.

Levy goes on to talk about how this is his first non-comedy.  I think a better way to put it is this is his first movie where he's not attempting to do comedy.  Ironically, this attempt to go serious may result in the funniest movie of his career.