A recipe for mediocrity

Rating: 5/10 (7 July 2007)

I loved the first 15 minutes of this movie. Unfortunately, the film didn't end until almost two hours later.
Here was the recipe: start with fifteen minutes of interesting character development and mysterious robot attacks. Next, throw out all efforts to deepen character development in favor of moving the lame plot forward. Next, bring in several unnecessary and uninteresting characters (the blond computer hacker and her black friend) to confuse things and take up time. Then, make the audience wait for the action by adding unnecessary attempts at humor (i.e. the scene at the boy's house and the addition of the John Tuturro character with Special unit 7 or whatever it was called). Finally, be sure to fill the remaining time with cool shots of the transformers transforming and shooting things (which were good I must admit). The audience will be awed by the special effects and won't realize what a poor movie they've just seen.
By the way, how is it that one robot could destroy an entire outpost earlier in the film but a whole fleet of robots couldn't hit even one marine later on? Those guys must have trained at the G.I. Joe headquarters to be able to dodge so many bullets.
This movie started great but quickly transformed into a sub par action film with shallow characters and little plot. The special effects were great but they weren't enough to keep this film from ending up on the scrap heap of mediocre action films.