You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig

Rating: 4/10 (24 June 2009)

How do you take a very ordinary, very formulaic film idea and turn it into something so over the top that it becomes an over-spectacularised mess of explosions and colour? Well if you're Michael Bay, you:
(a) Shoot every scene with a moving, sweeping camera so that you end up focusing on the bottom of people's chins. Or the bottoms of "hot girls".
(b) Base the action around America's world-superiority and military might and exaggerate it to the point that it makes the pro-Americanism sentiments of the likes of Rambo First Blood Part II and Rocky IV seem like dissident communist propaganda.
(c) Get as many helicopters as the film's budget can pay for, which in the case of Transformers 2 is a lot, and have them fly around next to each other for a third of the film's duration.
(d) Have multiple "funny" characters of various stereotypically ethnic backgrounds, particularly the African-American 'homie G gangsta', to balance out the hardcore caucasian American patriotism in order to, presumably, deepen the experience of the movie.
(e) Have your CGI artists do the directing for you while blowing up as many things as possible.
And there you have it, the five step formula for a Hollywood blockbuster. However unlike Pearl Harbour, Armageddon, The Rock, and Bad Boys I & II, Transformers started out as an excuse to sell toys to kids with the flimsiest and most nonsensical excuse of a plot holding all the figurines/characters together. Flimsy as in mechanical shape-shifting good guy aliens coming to Earth to fight their mechanical shape-shifting bad guy equivalents, all of them masquerading as vehicles while befriending humans and learning to speak English; nonsensical to the point that if a major character like Optimus Prime dies (in order to pave the way for another series of all-new toys) then no worries, just resurrect him with a convenient plot device like The Matrix of Leadership. In other words, with a film license so full of "anything goes", Michael Bay hit the jackpot.
This sequel is practically the same as the first film, the both of them essentially a series of convenient dead character resurrections, an overload of CGI, done up cars, girls with too much makeup, and hit-or- miss jokes (but mainly miss: the two "wise-cracking" Homie G transformers are especially cringe-worthy). It's quite clear that the script was written well after the action set-pieces were decided upon - how else could you explain it when characters can travel from America to the Egyptian pyramids in an instant via a teleporting Transformer. Insert teen-relationship staple movie clichés with a Transformer posing as a nubile girl and you've pretty much got your film.
In some ways the movie feels like a revival of the one-man-army popcorn action flick from the 80s and early 90s, and given how Transformers 2 turns out it's rather easy to see why that genre died. For a movie as far-fetched as this with what is practically a prerequisite to turn your brain off as you enter the theatre, it is amazing and even slightly insulting how 9/11 can warrant a mention; Barack Obama is also referred to by name just for realism's sake. I find it extraordinary that such intentionally over-the-top movies, more often than not from Bay himself, can attempt to try their hand at political commentary. Perhaps it was even Obama himself who said it best with the quote, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig", which sums up Transformers 2 to a tee.