More than meets the eye: less than meets the brain

Rating: 6/10 (1 July 2009)

To make an awkward analogy, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is like a stupid and superficial party-crazy super-model on drugs with a car/military fetish. This is a tough movie to review. It's bound to make a ton of money even though the professional critics pretty much hated it. Who's wrong? the public who pays to see it and liked it or the critics? If I don't like it, am I being snobbish and expecting too much of a summer popcorn blockbuster? I liked the first movie way more than I expected, it was fun, spectacular, exciting and the robots were cool. The second movie left me numb and perplexed. It starts well enough with a thrilling action sequence (where you do have trouble identifying who are the good and bad guys, a recurring problem) followed by a relaxed scene showing the funny returning parents (love the mother) and the upcoming trip to college by Sam (played by Shia Labeouf who does a very good job as usual). At that point, the movie still felt right.
I'm not sure how a rather simple plot became confusing. I also had trouble caring about the fate of the characters. Since I'm not particularly dumb and tend to enjoy more complex films, I'll attribute this to bad storytelling. There's even a big deus ex machina for good measure, sign of the lazy writer. The film is also blatantly commercial and excels into making American military look heroic so if those things bug you, steer clear. On one hand, the visual effects are awesome, on the other hand the writing sucks and the dialog is trite. The actions scenes are spectacular but very busy and too often you have trouble identifying the fighting robots. The robots have virtually no characterization and often go unnamed. The exceptions would be Bumblebee but only at the start, the little twin cars who are not only annoying but hard to understand, an older bearded robot seen later on and a tiny hyperactive radio-controlled monster truck. There's a huge variety of Transformers, they look amazing and their transformations are even better than the first film but how I wish they had at least some of the minimal characterizations of the TV shows. Is that too much to ask?
The music is appropriately bombastic or heroic. The sound effects are loud and powerful. Yet the sound mix is sometimes bad, drowning out the voices. The director Michael Bay is quite good at making visually impressive set pieces and money shots (he loves his slow-motion) yet he falters in other ways. The movie logs in at around 2 hours and a half. It started feeling long mid-way through. The old returning characters are still the best, the new ones, either human or robotic, are lackluster. It's certainly not as good as the first film, which to be fair, had the novelty factor going for it. The human parts are not as clever or engaging. There's more robots but keeping track is confusing and it's almost too much of a good thing. The sequel has more of everything except storyline, human touch and charm. If you liked the first, you'll likely be curious to see the sequel, if you haven't done already, but I wouldn't pay full price for it. If you're a male who loves hot babes, hot rods/robots, cool action and lots of explosions, you're going to love this. I was disappointed but not as much as the critics said I should be.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10