Stick with the cartoon

Rating: 1/10 (1 May 2009)

Okay, so it's a film about a bunch of shape-changing robot toys by the director of Armageddon and Pearl Harbour, but then Pirates of the Caribbean was a film based on a theme park ride produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and that turned out alright. So I did my best to approach Transformers with an open mind. And for the first half hour or so it's fine, the barely-seen giant robots providing a nice sense of menace as - this being a Michael Bay film - soldiers run around shouting at each other and firing their machine guns while everything explodes in the background and Jon Voight wears a suit and looks very earnest and jet planes take off against a vividly colour-filtered red sunset and the world's hottest female computer hacker tries to work out what's going on.
And then the good robots (Autobots, for the uninitiated) make their entrance and open their big metal gobs and start spouting dialogue that sounds like it's been swiped wholesale from the 80s TV series, and the film stops being a 12 rated action movie and turns into a cartoon for the under 10s. And the meagre plot runs out, leaving the film to stutter and splutter and limp feebly towards the huge climactic fight scene as the Autobots (who are sworn to protect human life!) stage their big stand against the evil robots in a heavily populated city centre, and everything goes BANG! In the end, Transformers left me with one burning question: Who is the film aimed at? If children, why are there references to an activity normally but not exclusively enjoyed by teenage boys in their bedrooms? If adults, why are the story and dialogue so childish? If the grown-up "geek" market, why are the good robots treated as little more than the comic relief and why does Optimus Prime's "real face" look so goofy? (Surely the most disappointing reveal since Darth Vader's helmet came off.) They should put this in a boxed set with the 80s Dolph Lundgren He-Man film and call it "Why action figures don't make good live-action movies".