Very slick and fun, but could easily have been twenty minutes shorter

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2007)

"It's goofy fun with a lot of stuff that blows up real good, and it has the grace not only to realize how preposterous it is, but to make that into an asset". This is what Roger Ebert wrote in his review of Transformers, Michael Bay's summer blockbuster based on an '80s cartoon series, stating that after a succession of mediocre films (Pearl Harbor being the climax) Jerry Bruckheimer's former protégé finally got it right with an action film that works because it doesn't take itself seriously. That's exactly how the movie should be approached: the minute someone starts questioning the script's plausibility instead of praising the great humor, there's nothing left to do.
That the concept is, in Ebert's words, "preposterous", is evident from the very beginning: a group of American soldiers stationed in Quatar are suddenly attacked by an unidentified, lethal machine, and a few hours later several top secret files are stolen from the Air Force One's mainframe, prompting the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) to summon the best signal analysts in the country in order to understand what they are dealing with. Unfortunately, the enemy is neither Chinese nor Russian: the bad guys are Decepticons, alien robots who are able to transform into normal vehicles and therefore "live" among us unseen (their home-planet, Cybertron, was destroyed during a war). These droids have a double mission: firstly, they must find their leader, Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving), who disappeared while looking for the Allstar, a mysterious, powerful cube; secondly, they have to retrieve that cube, which will enable them to turn every machine on Earth into a weapon and conquer our planet with no difficulty at all. They are, however, not the only ones seeking the Cube: the Autobots, another Cybertron race led by Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen, who also played the role in the cartoon show), are after the Allstar as well, and Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a teenager whose grandfather somehow figured out the mysterious object's location, is on their side.
The director originally turned down the film, calling it a "stupid toy movie", only to realize he had said the same thing regarding Raiders of the Lost Ark over twenty years ago and subsequently change his mind. And even though Bay is no Steven Spielberg (who coincidentally is the executive producer of this movie) and LaBeouf, as likable as he gets, is no Harrison Ford, Transformers is a genuinely enjoyable ride. Why? Because Bay, having realized some stories cannot be handled seriously (which is the mistake he made on his previous works), delivers his latest blockbuster exactly as it is meant to be: very loud, dumb, unpretentious and, most of all, funny. Rather than playing it straight, he focuses on the comedy that emerges from the film's far-fetched scenario: Sam's laughable yet realistic attempts to seduce his friend Mikaela (Megan Fox), his reaction to the discovery that his new car is actually an Autobot, a hilarious conversation with his parents concerning what he was doing alone in his room with the door locked (unmissable). Not all the laughs come from the leading man, mind: the supporting players contribute a lot to make the movie one of the most ridiculously entertaining of the year, particularly John Turturro as the uptight, idiotic Agent Simmons ("You gonna lay the fate of the world on a kid's Camaro?").
Sadly, all this fun can't distract from the movie's main flaw: the running time. At 144 minutes, it is way too long for a flick like this, and some of the action scenes (especially the final showdown, which goes on and on for what seems like an eternity) could have been shortened, leaving the movie with an acceptable duration (let's say two hours) and more time spent on the human side of the story rather than the CGI.
Still, Tranformers is probably the year's smartest dumb movie. Plus, any film that's cheeky enough to make fun of its director ("This is so much better than Armageddon!" a character says halfway through the picture) deserves a look.