A frankly dull and terrible movie.. aimed at 6 year olds

Rating: 2/10 (12 August 2007)

How did this movie end up so bad? In theory its a movie that couldn't fail.. yet somehow they manage to make it not just dumb (which can be fine in an action flick) but incredibly BORING as well.
It bears an uncanny resemblance to Herbie: Fully Loaded in terms of its casting, the sophistication of it's plot, and the style of movie making. Its basically a lightweight teen comedy.. which happens to have a few big robots that show up occasionally to do clownish comedy.
The lead character is reasonably funny, in a lightweight kinda way. Its just that the jokes go on.. and on... and on... after about 20 minutes you are severely hoping he'll get annihilated by the decepticons.
Unfortunately for the audience.. the decepticons don't really even show up for about 90 minutes.. apart from a crazy, comedy, mini decepticon which acts kinda like a hyperactive jar jar binks.
Even more criminally, the Autobots aren't in the movie much either. Probably their largest amount of screen time is an ENDLESS comedy skit where they bumble around the back garden, treading on fountains, getting peed on by dogs and trying to hide from the kid's parents. (who are also kinda funny.. but seem to think they are in an American Pie movie).
The special effects are pretty sweet, but not quite as amazing as they are made out to be. The integration with the real world is usually pretty good. But the little jar-jar robot looks like some reject SFX from 5 years ago.
The action sequences are huge... with lots of explosions and destruction. But they aren't very coherent. Part of the problem is the new designs for the robots.. when they are in motion they look like an indistinct pile of garbage. Trying to see what is actually going on when two indistinct shapes are flipping around and fighting in amongst all the explosions, and with all the bad editing, is pretty hard.
Which must be why they mostly ignore the autobots and concentrate on showing us the US army shooting at stuff, and running in slow motion. (its a great advert for the army... plus yahoo, pontiac, and all the other blatant product placement).
The action sequences just don't measure up in terms of excitement, pacing and coherence to recent movies like Die Hard 4.0.
The film gets 4 points for Optimus Prime. He still rocks. His voice is cool. He's not actually in the movie much.. but when he is he usually rocks. Unfortunately it then loses 2 for making him say "my bad".
Also.. what happened to the cute blonde hacker, and her comedy sidekick (yet another one)??? They just disappeared from the story.
I'm not exactly sure what happened to Michael Bay.. he made one of the best action movies ever in The Rock.. and every subsequent film has been worse. This one actually makes Armageddon look like a good movie. OK popcorn flick.. but as is, its pretty terrible. 2/10