Entertaining but dragged down by heavy flaws

Rating: 5/10 (2 July 2009)

I'll start with the pros: There's no denying it – the movie is irresistibly entertaining. Michael Bay has received much criticism throughout his career, but one thing that must be said is that the man knows how to shoot an action scene. And how to shoot a movie in general – his over-the-top, hyper-stylized style, featuring smooth camera moves, slow motion and lots of sunset photography is among the best and most satisfying in the action genre. The action set pieces featured are wildly entertaining and quite imaginative, and are shot and present exceptionally well, really highlighting and emphasize everything that is purely and totally cool about them. I mean, the film sets out to depict giant robots fighting other giant robots, large-scale action scenes, explosions, destruction and high octane, no-holds-barred action sequences – and it delivers completely on these promises. Many scenes in the film, especially the action-oriented ones, left me sitting with a huge, childish, gleeful grin across my face, and were just as exciting and thrilling and heart-pounding as I could have asked for and then some.
Another element of the film that I really liked was the cast. Another example of a film personality getting perhaps more criticism than I think he deserves is Shia LaBeouf; I praised his performance in the first film a couple of years ago, applauding his irresistible and inherently natural charisma, screen presence and ability to superbly combine great comedic chops with more action-oriented feats and even likening him to a young Tom Hanks in terms of his fast-talking, highly energized, hilariously neurotic performance. Well this time around, LaBeouf matches and even surpasses his performance, augmenting the comedic elements with uproarious results while still managing to perfectly deliver the average-guy-turned-action-hero persona. Megan Fox hits her marks and plays her role as eye candy with expert professionalism, and the supporting cast members including John Turturro, Kevin Dunn and Julie White round out the comedic elements to mostly satisfying and quite funny results – although the movie would definitely have benefited greatly had Jonah Hill accepted the role of LaBeouf's college roommate/sidekick.
And yet, the film is not without its flaws, and this time around, they are plentiful. After it ended, I realized what that familiar sensation I felt throughout the screening was – the film suffers from the same fundamental flaws as another high-profile sequel from a few years back, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. And it's no wonder when one notices that both films were written by similar screen writing duos. My assessment of the flaws of that 2006 release, especially in relation to its immensely entertaining and hugely satisfying predecessor, are effortlessly applicable to this sequel as well. It all starts with an inexplicable urge to multiply almost every conceivable element from the first film, without realizing that quantity is never preferable to quality. Wanting to outdo and improve upon the previous film in a series is an understandable and agreeable aspiration, but scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman must realize that this does not have to be achieved by bombarding audiences with burgeoned elements from the first film. So sure, some of these multiplications are acceptable: more robots, bigger action scenes, and longer runtime are by no means bad for the film in this case. But what suffers most from the "quantity over quality" mindset is the plot. Both the first Transformers and to a slightly lesser degree the first Pirates of the Caribbean films benefited from ambitious but relatively straightforward plots, while both sequels suffer from heavily saturated, over-detailed and totally convoluted multiple plot lines that, quite frankly, feel like they were made up as the filmmakers went along. Couple that with some truly dismal lines, some of which derive from the unnecessarily labyrinthine complexity of the plot (such as John Turturro's character exclaiming to himself as he climbs the pyramid, "That machine will destroy the sun if they turn it on. Not on my watch!" just because by this point audiences are so lost in the plot that they've forgotten what the machine is even there for and why everyone wants to get to it) and some distractingly glaring geographical and continuity errors (the pyramids at Giza and the palace façade at Petra, Jordan are actually hundreds of miles apart, and not adjacent as presented in the movie) and you get a script that ultimately drags the film very heavily down. And the dues ex machine near the end would drive screenplay gurus to suicide.
The first Transformers movie was extraordinary stupid: and yet, it so completely succeeded in its admitted aspiration to be a purely, completely enjoyable spectacle and entertainment that delivers everything it promises in terms of robot action and fantastic set pieces while never taking itself seriously, that its ridiculous plot and silly, campy elements were easily ignored and perhaps even complemented it. The plot of Revenge of the Fallen is beyond stupid, but the difference is that while in the first film the brainless plot is ignorable, in the sequel it's actually quite distracting. All these elements are easily comparable to the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and similarly, both franchises took something of a fall in their second films. Like Dead Man's Chest, I felt that Revenge of the Fallen suffered from an overly dense and extremely convoluted plot which not only damaged the quality of the film, but more importantly, failed to retain the novelty, the magical sense of wonder and discovery that the first films in these franchises benefited from so wonderfully. So while this sequel was still immensely and unquestionably entertaining, I still feel that much of what made the first film so utterly enjoyable was lost. And considering the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise's track record, I'm not particularly optimistic about the inevitable third Transformers film to come.