Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Where do you even start with a movie like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? I'm not one to pass up a midnight movie so I went and saw this last night with a sellout crowd. You know going in what you're getting, lots of action, explosions, crazy CGI, all the makeups of the classic summer blockbuster. I mildly liked the first movie so I went in with modest expectations at best for the sequel. Somehow though, it didn't even live up those low expectations, and I'm not even sure where to start.

A plot for a movie like this is about as unnecessary as it gets. It needs something to push the action forward and let the CGI take over from there. Here, even getting to that point is slow-going. Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is off to college after saving the world from the Decepticons in the first movie with Optimus Prime and the Autobots. Life's pretty good for young Sam, he's got a gorgeous girlfriend, Mikaela (Megan Fox), and things have settled in nicely. But as he's moving, Sam finds a piece of the cube from the 1st movie with the little splinter giving him these crazy hallucinations with weird symbols.

Things develop and next thing you know new Decepticon leader Starscream is leading a rescue effort for Megatron, buried deep in an ocean trench, all in the hopes of helping the Fallen, a disgraced Decepticon, get back to Earth and take over the planet. There's more going on there, but it doesn't matter. The story bounces along and around so much it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Suffice it to say, most moviegoers aren't plopping down $11 to see Transformers for its well-written script.

So where to start? Just like the first movie, I enjoyed parts of the sequel and hated others. I'll get the negatives out of the way first. At 147 minutes, it's way too long. The Sam-to-college intro takes far too long to develop and tries too hard to get laughs including Sam's extremely annoying mother buying 'special' brownies and downing a whole bag. It's the type of college that never really exists, frat parties with strobe lights, pounding bass, beautiful girls dancing on tabletops and of course...cake with a serving knife. Uh, yeah, right.

In general, the humor is just too much from start to finish. Some good one-liners are needed in a movie like this, but not every other line of dialogue. Sam's parents, Kevin Dunn and Julie White, serve no purpose at all and provide many of the more groan-inducing lines, the Mom more than the Dad. Two new Autobots have been added, Mudflap and Skids, and might be the two most stereotypically offensive, annoying characters ever. SPOILER I hope they died in the battle with the sand-eating Decepticon, but I couldn't tell for sure.

Now for the action, what people pay to see right? Some criticisms of the 1st movie said there wasn't enough robot vs. robot action. Well, Bay took that too heart and overdoes it here. I'll give props when they're due. The CGI in both movies is so ridiculously good that at times I believe there's actually an Optimus Prime fighting Megatron. It rarely looks fake like so many other big budget blockbusters. But the problem for me is that when it comes down to it, it's still 2 nameless robots beating the crap out of each other. They're so detailed it's hard to even tell what's happening until one or the other rips his opponent's arm or head off. The finale in Egypt goes on far too long as robots go to town on each other.

To the casting now, both the good and the bad. I didn't care for LaBeouf much in the first movie, thought his character almost ruined Indiana Jones 4, but came around some when I saw Eagle Eye. He's actually pretty good here, toning down some of his eccentricities from the first one. He still yells too much just to yell, but it was his storyline that kept me at least somewhat interested. That storyline is with smoking girlfriend Mikaela, the babely Megan Fox. By no means a great actor, she's believable here as Sam's girlfriend, their relationship in general is pretty believable. Bay of course know his audience and has Fox running in slow motion in a ton of shots as you can see above, I lost track after 7, and changing and undressing and posing on motorcycles. I am that audience so I'm not complaining, just pointing it out.

My favorite part of the first one was the soldiers, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese, dealing with the appearance of the Decepticons in the Middle East. It didn't seem as forced as the rest of the movie. Two years later in the sequel, they've been upgraded to the NEST program, a joint operation betwen U.S. forces and the Autobots to protect the Earth. Their characters aren't given much to do, but they're cool characters even if they talk in overused, well-known movie cliches like "This isn't going to end well" and "What the hell is that?"

John Turturro returns as Agent Simms and with new arrival Ramon Rodriguez as Leo, Sam's roommate, a conspiracy theorist, provide the most annoying pairing in the movie. Turturro, almost always dead on in his parts, provides most of the comic relief or at least attempts at it but is just too overdone to be enjoyed. Rodriguez is required to scream every few minutes and look worried before saying something stupid. Other than that, no big casting changes although Australian beauty Isabel Lucas is good in a small part as Alice, a fellow freshman with the hots for Sam.

That's the movie in a nutshell, well a big nutshell I guess. I realize that with summer blockbusters we're not looking for all-time classics, but I do want to be entertained. By the last 40 minutes or so, I was bored to tears hoping all the robots would just kill each other and be done with it. It felt to me like Michael Bay came up with all these great ideas, threw them in a blender and started filming. The movie's all over the place with no real sense of direction other than crazy, stupid action, and even Megan Fox's hotness can't save it although she tries her best. And brace yourself, there's a third one coming! GASP! Keep it in mind when we're supposed to think Sam's dead. Ooops, spoiler alert.