Big... Bland... Boring... and barely worth scanning through as a rental.

Rating: 5/10 (29 June 2011)

I'm fine with brainless action movies, as long as they entertain in some way, like with a fun romp or a tense chase. But this movie fails to entertain, it has no drive, no story, and no spark. Even the effects scenes, while technically well done, somehow don't add much. They rarely amaze, and there's little sense of grandeur, its all too busy, too much smoke and flying bits, and too tedious.
The characters are lifeless, we don't know anything about them, and they have no motivations. They hit their marks but nothing more, like set dressing, just enough presence to allow positioning the effects around them. And star actors are sprinkled throughout, but their characters are not at all essential to the minimal story. They seem to have been added at the last moment, maybe for some needed interest, but its little help.
The story is a pieced together mess, with numerous nonsensical leaps, and characters that suddenly appear when needed, though never seen before. Too much time is spent on story lines that have no relevance, like the job hunting, or all the bickering. Characters are sometimes bizarre in ways that are slapstick, and this stands out as interesting, though with no connection to anything.
This movie is listed as Sci-Fi, ideally an exploration of ideas, of what could be. But no ideas are evident here, and nothing is explored. In the first Transformers movie we got to see some of that, but not in this one. Instead we have goofy little sidekick robots, and giant evil robots that apparently have limitless amounts of power and energy at their disposal, enough to physically destroy cities or move their home planet to earth, though for some reason they need us earthlings to act as slave labor.
There were a few fun parts in the whole thing, like the historical revisionism, or when people are in a building that's being toppled over, or a few oddball laughs here and there. And the 3D was better than in many recent movies.
It might help if this movie were half as long, literally, to chop out all the empty filler, though it wouldn't help much. But at least there wouldn't be that painful "I love you" scene near the end. Heck, just edit out the girlfriend all together. Like the movie, she's pretty, but pretty much useless.