Real Steel – review

Shawn Levy, who directed such lucrative disasters as the Steve Martin remakes of The Pink Panther and Cheaper by the Dozen , has been brought in by Steven Spielberg to make this conflation of The Champ (the 1931 tearjerker about a drunken boxer redeemed by his long-estranged son, Jackie Cooper) and Rollerball , the futuristic action flick built around a violent popular sport. The setting here is Texas a decade hence where the big attractions for raucous fans are contests to destruction between giant, remote-controlled robots. There's a certain poverty of imagination at work.