Plot holes you can drive a transforming truck through

Rating: 3/10 (1 August 2009)

I was horribly bored one night with my girlfriend out of town, my friends all at work, and nothing else to do but sit around my apartment and drink, so I decided I'd instead go see a movie, but the only one I was even remotely interested in seeing, tragically, was Transformers 2.
The first Transformers was a slightly confusing, often annoying, and thoroughly overblown shiny toy commercial that was upgraded into a shiny car commercial, because let's face it, product placement is everything, with a somewhat silly, but at least cohesive story. Shia Lebouf was annoying, Megan Fox was hot, the robot action was gritty, though a bit confusing because the camera angles always seemed to by just a few degrees off center, which is difficult to do when you consider they're using bloody computers to make this film, and whatever depth the movie might have had was sucked out by a horrific soundtrack, annoying characters, and the slight undertone of racism when Jazz, the black transformer, died at the end.
Transformers 2 took all of the faults of the first movie, put them in a can, and rattled them around for a while, then added more and dumped it out onto the screen. The action scenes seem to take place on a camera that's being swung around by an epileptic monkey, and while the visual effects are impressive, they're somewhat diminished by the fact that you can't tell what the HELL is going on. Even in hi def, the robots all look the same but for the accessories pasted to their robot bodies, and the story is so disjointed it reeks of multiple writers that didn't even consult each other when putting the script together. Apparently there's this guy, the Fallen, the original Decepticon, and everyone who picks up on the vaguely religious aspect, congratulations, now go change your diaper. Anyway, this Fallen is the secret leader, he's looking for energon, and the only place to get it, apparently, is by blowing up the sun with a big secret machine buried in the pyramids of Egypt. I guess a sufficiently advanced race of aliens can only power themselves slightly better than a kid with two photovoltaic cells in a science fair. Anyway, Shia Lebouf returns, only more annoying than ever. But apparently he wasn't annoying enough so they tacked on a pair of 'Ghetto bots' that are like a pair of Jar-Jar's made of metal that continue to raise the undertones of racism to new lows. I know that's contradictory, and I don't care. Megan Fox also returns, the true highlight of the movie, because she's the hottest piece of (actress) this side of a young unviolated Angelina Jolie. In fact she's so hot, even the robots are humping her in this movie, which makes me think the script really was written by eight different thirteen year olds. This movie takes us around the world, introduces a bunch of new characters, then kills them off (except for the Ghetto bots, and that might be borderline racist to some, but honestly, they're so bad, I think it's racist NOT to kill them and bring Jazz back to life with an improbable plot device of some kind, and there's no shortage of those.)
Even though I beat relentlessly on this movie, there were parts that were fun... for a while. But the end is so needlessly drawn out I was genuinely looking at my watch two hours into the film wondering why we hadn't even approached a conclusion yet, and how much longer we had to wait for them to bring Optimus back to bloody life and save the bloody day so the bloody bad robots (who seem to have legions at their command, yet keep losing badly) can go away at last. Drawn out battle scenes only work at a certain level of tension, but the longer it goes on, your adrenaline burns out, you crash, and wonder why you should even give two Shia's about the outcome. But then, Michael Bay probably just needs some Ritalyn and everything will be fine.