With “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” Michael Bay’s unrelenting predisposition to tremendously long action scenes that use extreme length and continual explosions to numb the mind into a sense of excitement takes hold once more, leaving the audience with a film that gives up every scrap of dignity, character, and logical plot development.
The film begins with Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf, “Eagle Eye”) leaving for college, where once again his parents (played again by Kevin Dunn, “Vicky Christina Barcelona” and Julie White, “Michael Clayton”) outdo LeBeouf’s performance with humor and actual acting skills. Meanwhile, Sam’s girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox, “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”) is left behind, unsuccessfully trying to get Sam to tell her she loves him — this superfluous romance angle having no bearing on the plot and being a lesson Bay evidently did not learn from “Pearl Harbor’s” failure. Then, an ancient story begins unraveling but quickly gets sucked up and lost in action scenes after all hell breaks loose and the Autobots and Decepticons go at it for hours on end, literally.
Included in the mix is an unexplained human robot (in case you missed “Terminator: Salvation”), the reprisal of a few uninteresting and further undeveloped characters from the first film, and a Megan Fox who remains present solely for shots of pouty lips and slow-motion boob jiggling, successfully capitalizing on all of her talents. Serious Transformers fans may be pleased to hear that a great deal of their favorite characters are probably present with the addition of several Autobots and Decepticons both, but the end result is quantity over quality as not a single new character is a character at all. With the exception of an interesting Decepticon named Jetfire, the rest are present simply as robots in battles.
The action certainly is amped up this time around, sometimes to an absurd degree, even for a Michael Bay film. But the fireworks have lost their intrigue and heart without characters we actually care about, and even the CGI has notably suffered in quality despite reportedly using 140 terabytes to process during the film’s production. Optimus Prime is regrettably absent for most of the film, and a few of the robots that are present are alarmingly disconcerting, most notably the twin Autobots Mudflap and Skids, who embody a remarkably offensive variety of negative African American caricatures, like a modern, robotic “Amos ‘n’ Andy” pairing. Although, progress is made in terms of robot equality; an ostensibly female Autobot even gets a single line before promptly being obliterated.
Except to insert jokes about balls and humping, which this movie likely has more of than Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Br?no” will, the action never stops. This can be of great value to the kids who’ve taken the franchise to heart, but leaves the rest of us wondering how so many millions can be spent animating a movie that has so little content. And when the movie does finally end, the conclusion is as surprisingly sudden as it is anticlimactic.
The mechanics are all off, and the spark that made “Transformers” a success has simply gotten lost somewhere along the way. It causes one to rethinks whether adapting the great series into live-action films was really a good idea in the first place.
1 star out of 5.
