CinePhillyist Reviews... Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

But spending time thinking about the plot of a Michael Bay movie is a pointless exercise. What plot there is is just a series of excuses for increasingly bigger and more impressive robots to have giant, slow motion fights with each other while humans run away and/or fling missiles at them. And admittedly, the robots are pretty impressive, as are the action scenes. But there are so many! The film just goes on and on. After a while even the most devoted fans of robots punching each other have to get a little tired and bored. And frankly I was bored almost from the beginning. That's because Bay has forgotten (or never cared to learn) an essential rule of filmmaking: even the most impressive action sequence or special effects extravaganza is meaningless and dull if we don't care about the characters involved. And it's really hard to care about any of the people or robots in this movie. In fact, after sitting through a couple rounds of Bay's idea of characterization—which is to do a couple of stupid gags involving the character, or maybe have them spout a few earnest and corny cliches, before going back to the explosions—I was really kind of rooting for them all to be killed. Most of the scenes not involving explosions are nearly unwatchable; I found myself cringing and wincing and closing my eyes throughout much of the film. For Bay, comedy is two dogs humping each other, or a robot dog humping Megan Fox's leg, or a robot using contemporary slang, or Shia LaBeouf making funny faces and then making a fool of himself in front of his astronomy class, or a robot farting out a burst of fire, or a robot farting out a parachute. These pointless and agonizing attempts at humor are constantly being inserted into the film. They add nothing and just make the film even longer and more painful than it already is. The most agonizing and endless "comedy" sequence of all is when Sam's mother accompanies him to college and—get this—buys brownies with marijuana in them! Then she eats the brownies! And then she goes on a completely unrealistic rampage across campus, embarrassing Sam to no end! Boy, I'm glad that was in the movie. I really wouldn't have understood the subtle nuances of Sam's mother's character without that scene.

Of course, there are plenty of other horrible characters. John Turturro's pathetic, irritating secret agent character is back (oh, hooray). And there's a new politician character, who tries to get the military unit working with the Transformers shut down, and the Autobots kicked off the Earth. There's no really good reason for him to be doing this; he's just the stereotypical oily politician character who's in the movie for two reasons: to obstruct the protagonists, and so we can have a human character to hate, and to laugh at when bad things happen to him.

The horrible characters aren't restricted to the human population, either. The twin robots Mudflap and Skids are actually occasionally amusing, but are also constantly on the edge of becoming really offensive racial stereotypes. Bay apparently really loved Jar-Jar Binks and thought he should have something similar in his movie. And what is the deal with the Decepticon "doctor" robot who speaks with a German accent? Is that a Nazi Decepticon?!

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has dazzling visual effects, neat robots, cool action, and, yes, the occasionally funny gag. Plus, good God does Megan Fox look hot, especially when running in slow motion (which she does often in this movie). But none of these fleeting pleasures makes up for the film's relentless stupidity; its crude, unfunny humor; its painfully corny dialog; and its complete lack of imagination, reality, or humanity. It's larger than life and more than meets the eye—and completely empty inside.