Some decent special effects, that's pretty much it

Rating: 5/10 (12 December 2011)

(www.plasticpals.com) I'll be honest with you. I don't like Michael Bay's movies. Dumb science fiction sucks. From the disgustingly bad Armageddon to the brain-damaged The Island, there's only so much a man can take before writing off a director. So despite being a child of the '80s, having grown up on a steady diet of Transformers cartoons and toys, I didn't bother making the trip to the theater to see the live-action Transformers. I waited until it was out on DVD, and then waited another year and a half before finally finding the time to watch it. Did I mention I'm not a fan of Shia LaBoeuf? I'll be honest with you. This is probably Michael Bay's best movie to date. Granted, that's not saying much but at least I can see a noticeable improvement here. It's not a bad movie – in fact, it's pretty entertaining. It has its share of stupid moments, makes one too many pop-cultural references which will badly date it, and spends too much time focusing on the humans rather than the true stars of the show, but it gets by. Stomaching the first three-quarters to get to the action-packed finale (which ends in typically bad deus ex machina fashion) is probably worth it, since the battles between the beloved Autobots and their equally admired Decepticon adversaries look surprisingly great.
I don't imagine integrating giant robots into city streets is an easy thing to do, and Transformers does it quite well. I'm not a huge fan of the new robot designs, whose exoskeletal frames are broken up into about a thousand pieces when transformed, but I'm willing to grant that alien technology might look more like magic than human-comprehensible technology.
I will give it a recommendation but before watching it you may want to set your IQ to something like 75.