Stereotypes, Sex Jokes, Sex Jokes, Over the Top Slapstick Humor, and Sex Jokes

Rating: 3/10 (25 June 2009)

If you're a smart movie goer and want something with big explosions and a good amount of tension to turn your brain off to, see Terminator Salvation, because this one isn't redeeming enough to spend 8 dollars on. Terminator sucked in its own right, but at least it had one interesting character. Let me explain.
Michael Bay takes a lot of flack from so-called "haters" these days, and with good reason. You either love or hate the first Transformers movie, right? Well, I didn't love or hate it. I thought it was good for an escapist action flick. It had decent enough characters and a plot that you could follow, even if you didn't think some of the humor worked or thought that Megan Fox was just there as eye candy. Well, the same can be said of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, except for the fact that almost nothing works in this film like it does in the first.
Megan Fox is exploited more, there's more sex humor that's supposed to make us giggle, there are annoying robots that fist bump and act like offensive black stereotypes from ten years ago as if a KKK member wrote the script, there are robots that act and sound like gremlins, there are pointless characters that are there only to shout out terrible one liners, there are random explosions (see: aircraft carrier exploding for ten minutes in unconvincing CGI) there are even giant testicles on one of the Transformers and these are described as "the enemy scrotum." That's a direct quote. It's mildly funny in an immature, tongue in cheek kind of way, but it makes a mockery of the Transformers franchise, and that's how most of the film comes off.
We spend the majority of the film following Shia Labeouf and the US military around while they search for, guess what, another mysterious source of power that the Decepticons want. But let's face it, if you want to see this movie, you're not seeing it for plot, you're seeing it for the explosions, basically the eye candy. I can understand that, but the problem is that 75% of the movie is flat-out annoying.
The slapstick humor is too over the top and a lot of the jokes are out of place. There's even a scene in which Shia's mom eats a pot browny and tackles a college student playing frisbee. The point? There isn't one. It's one of the things that hampers this film throughout and it all stems from an incredibly sloppy script. The tone is disjointed and it often can't figure out if it's supposed to be an intense action movie or a fratboy's film made for his twelve year old brother who still thinks fart jokes are hilarious. (There are at least two obvious fart jokes, probably more).
The robots look good in most scenes, but the effects are strangely not up to par with the first film at times. It seemed sometimes like the effects team had a hard time keeping the framerate right during the big robot fighting scenes. It's not a big problem, because it's gorgeous for the most part, but there are really only two glorious fight scenes and they're very far apart in this two and a half hour film that could have been cut in half if the writers knew what they were doing.
This is definitely one of those films that you either love or hate, and it's all going to bank on whether or not you can sit through the annoying over-the-top humor to get to the effects. Syd Field described movies like this as "characters running from special effects" so that the effects become the plot and character loses out. He's right on, but the biggest problem here is, as I've already said, the annoying humor and the sometimes cutesy cartoonish robots that don't really have any place tonally or plot-wise. I guess the humor is supposed to somehow hold the film together, but it doesn't even come close.
The script needed an overhaul, but it obviously never got one, and it all feels very thrown together and unpolished for the sake of cash. My advise is, if you LOVED the first movie, rent this one, because there's not enough here to redeem the flaws. The only robots from the first movie are Optimus Prime (who barely has any screen time) and Bumblebee (who spends most of his time in the background as a car), so you can't even rely on an expansion of those characters.
The only other positive thing I have to say about this film is we really get to see how much of a serious threat the Decepticons are. The good guys are always outnumbered, and the Autobots are essentially absent, which is strange since it's supposed to be a war of robots vs. robots, not humans vs. Decepticons. But it does make the war seem desperate, even if it makes the Autobots seem relatively useless without Optimus around to ninja-slash his way through anyone in his way.
3/10. Again, rent this one or see it in a dollar theater when you can. There are better turn- your-brain-off movies out there right now with their own flaws that you don't have to put up with for two and a half painful hours.