The Movie House -
Let me get this out of the way at the beginning. I hate director Michael Bay with every ounce of my movie loving soul.
This man is the penultimate hack director and a look at his resume will tell you why - Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys II, among others.
But there is one thing that all Bay films have in common. Each one of them has been huge box-office moneymakers, but each one of them are also huge failures at being good movies to watch.
In my honest opinion, Bay films in the future should be boycotted. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen easily proves why.
Now the first Transformers film was only an average one at best. In fact, I found it really difficult to sit through it again in preparation for this review. But it did make tons of the money at the box office, so of course a sequel was inevitable.
All your favorite characters (but not mine) are back for the sequel. Shia LaBeouf returns looking confused as ever as Sam Witwicky and Megan Fox is back acting more robotic than any of the Transformers as the token love interest.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the premise, the Transformers are a race of alien robots, which hide among us disguised as vehicles. The Autobots are the heroes and the Decepticons are the baddies. It's that simple.
But this movie is an absolute mess. I can't even recount the plot for you. Apparently the Autobots are fighting alongside the U.S. military wiping out the last of the Decepticons.
That is, until this really evil robot called the Fallen awakens and starts causing havoc in an attempt to go to Egypt and unlock some sort of machine will destroy the world ... or something. I'm not really sure to be honest.
I apologize for that lackluster description but that's the best I could do. Hard to follow does not even begin to describe this movie.
Now the television show on which these films are based put the emphasis on the different personalities of the robots themselves. The humans were relegated to supporting players.
In these movies it is the exact opposite. Quite frankly, these movies should be called Humans, rather than Transformers. It becomes especially annoying when the human characters are complete fools.
Shia and Megan are horrible. John Turturro is not funny. The military guys are not interesting whatsoever. Yet these people are on screen for two hours of this movie's bloated two and a half hour length. It simply numbs the brain.
The robots are not free from annoyingly written characters however. If you do see this abomination, look for the twins who transform into a pink ice cream truck. Yes you heard right a pink ice cream truck.
They are so annoying that I didn't feel they even deserved a death scene. They deserved to just be written out of the movie altogether.
I've been awful harsh on this movie so I will say one or two positive things. The special effects are a tad better.
During the robot fights, I could actually tell who was hitting who unlike the first film. I also found one of the battles about half way through the film to be riveting.
Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots, still manages to be an intriguing character even though he's only on screen for about ten minutes.
So in the long run, I feel we all need to band together as people and end Michael Bay's reign of cinematic terror. We should all boycott the inevitable Transformers 3 that I know will happen.
If we don't, who knows what cinematic madness he will subject us to next.
1J out of 4
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