If a good action movie is football, Transformers is flag football.

Rating: 3/10 (5 July 2007)

I knew that Transformers would be trite and hammy, that's OK. What I didn't know is that it would be an embarrassing caricature of everything bad we've come to expect from a Michael Bay film. I was ready to walk out after about 30 minutes because it became abundantly clear that the story wouldn't build up any steam until the last possible moment. Sure enough, the movie doesn't get on with business until the 90 minute mark.
The unsteady pacing reminded me of Jurassic Park. There's a dumb MacGuffin (in this case, a powerful cube) that keeps everybody stumbling around, slack jawed. Every 15 minutes or so a set brief piece jumps out of the bushes to shock the audience, then things shift back into 1st gear.
It's a frustrating movie to watch. The robots are amazing, but they barely have screen time that doesn't involve them fighting or pussy-footing around whatever the humans are up to. We never really care about what motivates the Autobots, because they don't share it with us. They just jump from one crisis to the next, all the while trying to go undetected like Mr. Snuffalopogus. Nothing ever makes a lick of sense, the action is impossible to follow, and after a while you just give up and stare blankly while people and robots scramble around trying to accomplish seemingly arbitrary tasks that change from minute to minute.
If this movie was directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct) we would have had delightfully one-dimensional charters taking a back seat to robots kicking the crap out of each other. Instead we get Michael Bay's melodramatic "Sweet Valley High Marine Corps" vision of the world which attempts to cheaply pull on our heartstrings at every given opportunity wile at the same time cramming in jillions of set pieces featuring exploding explosions and non sequiturs that can be explained away by jerky camera work.
With the amazing production design you'd think that it would have been easy to make Transformers into good popcorn fun. Instead it fees like work. The set pieces are clumsy, and never build to a point where we feel any sense of danger or tension. If a good action movie is football, Transformers is flag football.