Holy bad movie, Batman!

Rating: 1/10 (13 July 2007)

This entire film was a flashy commercial, start to finish. The biggest buyer of ad space--the US Army. At least half the movie was a blatant recruitment video, demonstrating myriad military systems working in seamless unison for the millions of children and young adults in attendance. Balderdash. Mountain Dew, Chevy, Pontiac, Hummer, Ford, Panasonic, and GMC are just a few of the other big spenders that were pounded into the minds of the audience.
The "plot," if you can call it that, was simply laughable. I can't remember the last time I saw a more cookie-cutteresque, formulaic flick. The whole thing seemed like one big mad-lib. If you've seen more than three movies in your life, you can guess the next ten minutes of the film at any given point. Forget spoilers--whatever you think is about to happen, you're probably right. And talk about a blatant open door to a sequel, which we can probably expect just about this time next year, just in time to promote all the 2009 model year cars, as well as a stream of other crap that's too useless to be sold on its own merits. I'm sure the CG artists have already broken ground on it. First order of business--produce at least 300 45-second, multi-angle, overly-dramatized, "chunk-chunk-chunk" sound-effect filled transformation scenes. That'll put them somewhere around half the number in this one.
Oh, and make sure you bring all the willful suspension of disbelief you can muster, because you WILL need it if you're to make it through to the end. You couldn't count on one hand the monumental and ridiculously improbable coincidences upon which the threadbare plot depends, even if that hand was holding a calculator. My favorite--someone hotwires a brand new vehicle by opening the door, reaching under the steering column, immediately grabbing two freely dangling and apparently stripped wires and sparking them together. Holy Dukes of Hazzard. Do the makers of this film really believe that America is peopled by such feeble-minded idiots?
To squeeze in more action and save the poor viewers from having to think too much, every formula character in the book was pulled out. All the usual suspects were in attendance: the hardcore marine guy, the "you can't handle the truth"-secret government agency guy (times two!), the hot computer chick, the dorky hero, the embarrassing, out-of-touch parents, the muscle-headed jock and the girl who dates him only to realize she's been dating bad boys for too long, and my personal favorite, the technically inclined but non-threatening black guy. And yes, Megan Fox is slap-your-granny hot, but it's ruined when every other scene she's in shows her with her chin up, mouth open wide, faint glimmer of sweat across her forehead in an obviously forced attempt at looking sexy.
This movie isn't a total wash, though. For those of you whose only desire in a film is to see big robots smash stuff (da-hyuck), boy is this the ticket for you! The action IS pretty non-stop, but unfortunately a lot of it is played too fast to really see what's going on--I suspect the CGers did this on purpose to eliminate cost and speed production. There are some decent comedic moments, but most of the jokes fall flat and some are downright inappropriate for my 5 and 7 year old. There was just enough character development for the robots to make you realize that, if they were real people, they would be MTV veejays (one of them break dances for God's sake) and were likely created in committee (think Poochie the dog from The Simpsons). And another thing--their faces were just plain creepy.
I had such high hopes for this film, but in the back of my mind I knew it would be turned into an ad bonanza with little to no true tie to the original story. I'm sad to say I was right on the money.