The Bayhem brought to its illogical conclusion

Rating: 4/10 (20 June 2009)

This film is a mess of ideas, explosions and shaky cam that fails to deliver anything near a coherent scene let alone a coherent plot. Bay tries far too hard, throwing so many ideas at the screen that none are given the opportunity to stick, let alone breathe. Over 40 robots appear over the 150 minute runtime of the film of which 1, Starscream, gets any kind of character development beyond the 3 set types, good, evil, or annoying.
The robots themselves are in dire need of some internal logic, what are their abilities? How are they made? Are their components sentient? As it is, the robots are so diverse as to defy any kind of movie logic explanation, some can disguise themselves, some are animalistic, some have opinions, some can break up into smaller pieces, some have apparent genitalia. The sheer number of them also cloud the issue, making it impossible to know, or recognise all the robots in the large fight scenes so that its very hard to tell whats going on and who's shooting who. Thats certainly not helped by the fact they all share the same shiny metal aesthetic and nearly everything is shot in close up shaky cam. Its symptomatic of a film that feels like it started with Michael Bay writing everything he thought was cool or funny on a sheet of paper and then trying to craft a script around it.
That might have worked better if Michael Bay had any kind of sense of humour. Dogs and robots hump each and people's legs furiously, LeBeouf mugs gamely but even his talents can't make up for the drivel he is given, but even he fares better than the awful material given to his screen parents. A special mention goes to the hip hop lingo spouting twin robots ruin every scene they are in. The biggest laugh in the screening I saw was for a man wearing a thong which says all you need to know.
The plot, such as it is, lacks coherence. I'm not asking for epic storytelling or multi-layered plots, I'm not even asking for emotional involvement, just a better explanation of what the evil guy's plan and why everyone is seemingly shooting everyone else in the desert. If I'm trying to snatch positives I could mention that Megan Fox is absurdly hot for the whole film, but thats partly because the camera ogles her curves at every opportunity, notably as shes bent over a motorcycle in the most gratuitous shot i've ever seen outside porn.
Overall its a bad, messy, dumb movie that I wouldn't recommend even for the unreconstructed action film fan in all of us.