Shockingly Bad

Rating: 2/10 (29 June 2009)

To sum up what's wrong about this film is not easy to do with limited space. I happened to enjoy the first movie in spite of it's short comings but this second one just seemed all wrong.
A few things worth pointing out: 1) Too much. Of what? Of everything basically. There were SO many new robots and SO much action that it quickly became inanely repetitive and numbing. After a while it just wasn't effective. Classical example of less-is-more is Jaws where we don't even see the monster for the first hour of the movie. Well here it's a more-is-not-enough approach. Michael Bay seems so completely incapable of savoring the moment, of letting something hang in the air (except the rancid stink of movie gone horribly wrong), of having a few quiet moments. If you build up to, say, an action climax through taut and tense plotting then when that violent action moment comes it can be very effective. But here it's like every single scene is trying to out-do the previous one in terms of loud crashes, rapid camera movements and big explosions. I had a head-ache the rest of the day.
2) Jar-jar Binks syndrome. Those twin robots... omg... they were beyond embarrassing. And what's with the etnification of robots. Shocking.
3) Poorly written script. Everything from the dialog to characterization (okay, maybe a silly thing to be expecting from a Michael Bay movie, but still) was rank. Considering the target audience for this movie is kids I felt quite discouraged walking out of the cinema thinking how from a very young age crass gender roles a slammed into our children's heads with a 2-by-4. All hail the passive, male-pleasing role of the ridiculously dolled-up female lead.