A struggle to sit through the entire thing

Rating: 1/10 (8 July 2009)

There are very few directors out there who are able to make a sequel to a movie and have it take the audience on another unique adventure that outshines the first. James Cameron can do it, George Lucas (I know he didn't direct Empire Strikes Back but he wrote it), and just last year Christopher Nolan proved he could do it too. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, director Michael Bay (Bad Boys, Armegeddon) proves that he definitely cannot do it.
The film is set two years after the first ended, where the US Army and the Autobots have combined to form a unit called NEST. It is NEST's job to hunt down the evil Decepticons left on Earth. It appears that Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons in the original, is actually just a peon and The Fallen, an extremely old robot, is the leader and begins another assault on our world. Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) meanwhile leaves his family and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) behind to attend Princeton University, which appears to have become populated with the hottest girls on the planet and is now an insane party school. Sam once again becomes hunted by the Decepticons because he holds the key to their past in his brain, and he teams up with NEST to destroy them.
The first scene is by far the best part of the movie, which isn't saying much. NEST tears through Shanghai as they hunt Decepticons, which leads to some spectacular robot fights and shows off the new and improved Autobots. Like the first movie, these robots have pretty creative designs, especially a trio of motorcycles. Finding any other positives in this trash heap is a chore. There is a good fight scene in a forest, and the girls in the movie are definitely easy to look at. especially Fox, but that's about it. Let me remind you this is a two and a half hour movie, so it becomes real boring real quick.
The writing, plot, and characters are so bad it makes the movie near unwatchable. This time around it is absolutely impossible to make any connections with the leading characters, whether they are human or robots. The plot is even worse. It is so random, full of plot holes, and boring that most of the audience had no clue what was going on, they were just hoping there would be a robot fight soon, and there wasn't. The climactic battle is a big joke. The humor is nothing more than surprisingly graphic jokes, like a college professor hitting on the girls in his lecture like its no big deal, or some stereotypical black robots complete with gangly ears and gold crooked teeth.
Even if you loved the first movie, it would be hard to like this one. Megatron, who was the biggest baddest robot that destroyed everyone else in a fight, gets turned into nothing more than a sissy little henchmen, which will leave many fans disappointed. The diversity of the robots in the first one is completely gone, and by the end of the movie the Decepticons are nothing more that generic silver robots with a gun.
Overall, this film takes an extreme fortitude to be able to get through. It is like a boring class lecture, where minutes seem to take hours to pass. It absolutely fails to grab the audiences attention and hook them into the characters, making it impossible to focus on the confusing plot. If Bay took two steps forward after making the first Transformers, and he took 100 steps back with this sequel.
3/10