Unbearably long, barely acted and filled with more sweeping camera shots than any other Michael Bay-directed movie before it, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is a terrible, lumbering behemoth of a film. When it's not an explosions-filled action movie, it's an awful teen comedy, teetering on the brink of being farcical.
Beginning with overlong backstory that nobody really understands or cares about, it's a while before we're reunited with the film's protagonist, Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf), as he prepares to set off for a normal life at college, fully intending to leave his transforming car, Bumblebee, behind. Unfortunately, along with Sam we're also reunited with his parents, Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White) who resemble a Laurel & Hardy-esque slapstick double act throughout the entire film. Laughs are played for witlessly in every scene they're in, which is far too many, including humping dogs (Twice! And in stupidly quick succession!) and the accidental ingestion of drugs. The enormous length of the film could have been trimmed drastically by leaving the majority of this stuff on the cutting room floor.
Following these two clods is the reintroduction of Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), conveniently sat astride a motorcycle. "Hey guys, remember in Transformers when she was leaning over that car? Well this time, she's sitting on a bike. And she's wearing denim shorts!" If Shia's performance here is one-note then Megan Fox doesn't even manage that. With a permanent pout throughout the entire two hour thirty minute run-time, she might be the film's chief irritant, an award that could very well have gone to just about anyone or anything featured here.
Revenge Of The Fallen was never going to be built on anything resembling logic, but it's cast aside completely in a scene where characters enter the front doors of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC and step out of the back door straight into a dusty field in Arizona. Add to all of this another cringe-worthy aspect - Bay's own revolting self-service. A Bad Boys 2 poster on a dorm room wall commands more screen time than some of the characters themselves (I'm looking at you, Tyrese Gibson) and a sweeping (Really?) shot of Megatron and Starscream atop a skyscraper harkens back to Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett, from that very same film.
And the problems never stop mounting up, like Michael Bay is rolling a festering Katamari through a field filled with bad movie tropes and cliches, making sure not to miss a single thing along the way. One of the many things it picks up is Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman's script, which completely fails to deliver on any front. The plot is devoid of any kind of comprehension with characters and robots alike being brought in solely to further the excuse for a story along before being shunted aside, or in one case, ejected from the back of an aeroplane. And why try to cram in so much story and exposition in a film that should be ninety minutes of CGI robots kicking chunks off one another? The set pieces involving robots that we do get can at times be completely jarring as metal limbs flail across the entire screen. Outside of CGI the action is paint-by-numbers Bay, military porn and massive explosions all filmed by cameras that swoop from left to right across the battlefield and then back again.
Explosions and gunfire fail to perforate the paper-thin story and cheap laughs that Revenge Of The Fallen is built upon. Is this the future of summer blockbusters - leaving your brain at the door?
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