Does the entertainment outweigh the neural damage?

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2007)

I'm a person who likes bad movies. I like good movies, too, but I often like the bad ones better. Why is that, silly me? Because they're entertaining. Self-building truck-shaped giant robots from outer space? Searching for some cuboid McGuffin to save the world? Fighting robots, exploding robots, cursing robots, robots urinating motor oil on people? Bring 'em on. But please make sure that I will have a good time with them.
Which is exactly what I didn't have with "Transformers". Maybe I'm getting too old for the kids' stuff, or I need to adjust my Ritalin level. But watching this was very much unlike watching a popcorn movie, it was more like having my brain replaced by popcorn, by people who happily assume that I don't have much of a brain to begin with.
The major problem is not that the movie is so heartbreakingly dumb. (Dumb in a way that makes you slap your head at times). Indeed, some scenes are so inane that the next "Scary Movie" film will have a hard time spoofing them (the scene where the two photos are compared -- indescribable; and the Camaro has its own in-built car wash?). The major problem for me was that it was all so annoying. The action pieces were visually uninterpretable, the robots were moving too fast for my poor visual cortex, the explosions didn't stop before the next ones started. It was simply too much for that 35-year-old brain of mine.
So even as an audiovisual trip, is it even entertaining? At least not for me. There was no story except for the absolute necessary, the bleached-out skeleton of a plot. There were endless military clichés. There were Jon Voight and John Turturro embarrassing themselves. There was no humor except the unintentional sort (the other one didn't work). The action scenes were undramatic and uninvolving. The love story was generic and flat. Worst: There's real and present danger of a sequel.
Looking at the professional reviews on "Rotten Tomatoes", I'm surprised that many critics treat this cinematic bomb so tenderly. Maybe it was too expensive to have an independent press?