This is what happens when you try to make a serious movie based on fad toys.

Rating: 1/10 (7 June 2009)

Christ.
Look, I know this movie was preceded by cartoons, comics, etc., but let's cut the bull: all of this was reverse-engineered from a fun fad toy line where a car/truck/gun changes into a robot. When your story's genesis is a children's toy, how serious of a movie can you expect to make out of it? I mean what's next, "Hungry Hungry Hippos: The $200 Million Summer Blockbuster"?
The biggest problem here is that this movie is not a hair smarter than "Power Rangers: The Movie" -- it just has a bigger budget. Other than that, it has a similarly nonsensical non-plot, typical characters without any motivation or credibility, cheesy hero-villain morality dialogue, and plenty of product placement shots to sell more crap.
Just as bad is the fact that nobody told the characters that they're essentially in a cartoon universe. The fact that anyone involved in this movie worked with a straight face is amazing. A bunch of dillweed army guys suddenly partner up with the Secretary of Defense to become the lovable rag-tag force that singlehandedly repels an alien invasion? With backsliding motorcycle stunts to boot? Whatevery you say! Amongst other problems:
-The ghetto thug Transformer.
-The peeing Transformer.
-The idiot robots idiotically creeping around the kid's backyard... "My bad" UGH
-A top secret government agent that talks and looks like a loan shark/car salesman/child molester.
-Megan Fox and Shia's romance not only has zero chemistry but also zero motivation and makes little to no sense: "Hey I'm a hot girl and I've been dating this toolbag jock like most hot girls do but yesterday I saw him make a typically obnoxious comment to this geeky virgin and decided that I will leave him and then fight in a robot-alien battle with said geek... Traumatic, stressful events like that naturally make me sexually attracted to the nerdiest losers around so let's make out afterwards"
-Hey, Megatron can't be a gun because that would violate conservation of mass... so let's make him into a Cybetronian jet (an excellent disguise by the way, because who on Cybertron could possibly suspect that a jet might actually be a sentient robot?)... oh wait, but then let's throw that obstacle out the window when it comes to the Allspark... something the size of a house and weighs multiple tons somehow "folds" (you heard me) into something the size of a toaster oven. Oh gee whiz.
-The climax is a solid half hour of non-stop eyeglazing crash/bash/explode scenes needlessly set in downtown LA to maximize destruction. "Here kid, take the Allspark and get to the top of the roof with it so that we can put it on a chopper and get it out of downtown LA because now that I think about it, bringing the Allspark from the Hoover Dam to downtown LA was a really stupid idea."
-Tired, cliché conversations between Prime and Megatron about how Prime is weak for trying to preserve innocent life, to which Prime responds: "I see a lot of good in them." Note to Michael Bay: this is the hero-villain conversation in EVERY SINGLE SUPERHERO MOVIE EVER MADE. How about spending a sliver of your gargantuan CGI budget to pay someone to write something a little bit more original?
-Optimus Prime and Megatron are brothers? What the hell? So does that mean they came out of the same robot mother's robot vagina? What in God's name.
Okay Michael Bay, I know what you're going to say: "Cut us some slack; the movie after all is based on a children's toy line"... No, Bay. You get no slack, because... WHY MAKE A MOVIE BASED ON A CHILDREN'S TOY LINE IN THE FIRST PLACE??? And moreover, WHY ATTEMPT TO GEAR IT TOWARDS ANYONE BUT CHILDREN??? An infantile basis will give you an infantile script will give you an infantile movie.
And it fails even as a popcorn flick: the action's all over the place -- by the end you can't even tell which robots are dead and which are still alive but you end up not caring because they all look and sound identical in apprearances and personality.