Garish excesses of empty spectacle - too much and too superficial to even find any fun in

Rating: 3/10 (3 July 2009)

Rarely can a director's style, credentials and modus operandi be encapsulated simply by their name, but no words can more concisely sum up Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen than "it's a Michael Bay movie". Infamous for his deliriously excessive action films, Bay tends to polarise audiences, with them either outrageously entertained or hit with fits of nausea and rage, and his latest robotic slugfest is no exception. Those repulsed by Bay's first Transformers will hardly be won over by its sequel, as Revenge of the Fallen feels less like a new narrative than an overblown retread of the first, with Bay's grandest ambition seemingly to be how much more of everything he can stuff into the template of the first film, as if assuming that more can only mean better. Predictably enough, it doesn't, as Bay's flagrant excesses go beyond guilty pleasure entertainment to simply being too much, capsizing the film through an overwhelming cascade of content, carnage, sound and CGI.
It is clear by the film's most common defense, "what would you expect from a Michael Bay movie with giant robots" that it is hardly going to be award winning dramatic material, but when such a defense is repeated ad nauseum with no other redeeming factors stated that the quality is increasingly suspect. Indeed, Bay's film feels less like cinema than being strapped to a roller coaster upside down while being shot at - an all out, chaotic visceral assault on the senses which forgoes coherence past the usual action film lapses to a complete disregard for any sense whatsoever. The word at hand is gratuitous, as if blatantly pandering to the 13 year old boy in everyone (as his comical quantity of 'Megan Fox running in slow motion shots' prove testament to) while bathing in cliché and jettisoning any sort of story cohesion. Laughably underdeveloped characters come and go with no explanation, with far too much time devoted to inane comic relief sidekicks while leads have seemingly little purpose (for all the hype regarding Megatron's resurrection, he does alarmingly little once back, and titular primary villain The Fallen has a similarly elusive role). The plot is reduced to characters screaming or babbling nonsensical exposition, and logic is dropped to the point of there being a twenty minute sequence during the final battle where it is near impossible to gather any sense of what is going on, making for a surreal, alienated feeling rather than giddy enjoyment.
All of which might normally be markers for a triumphant guilty pleasure were it not for the fact that the film is simply too much to even enjoy in a purely superficial way, coming across as maddening to the point of being boring. While Bay is clearly gunning for a movie 'experience', his film is far too long and obscenely self-indulgent, bulging at the seams with numerous sequences (particularly protagonist Sam Witwicky's early college scenes and the climactic battle scenes) needing not a judicious trimming as much as a vicious hacking. Obnoxiously loud and nasty, Bay's film lumbers all over the place too much to enjoy, feeling despite the frantic movement and noise, as if nothing is really happening. All the while, it would seem Bay somewhat loses track of his film's own mythology, offering not so much plot holes as chasms. Similarly, as ironic as it is to complain about such a film having too much complexity, the narrative is simply too frantic with too much going on to possibly follow, making the already nonsensical plot amplify to frenzied levels. Instead of even a shade of a story, Bay offers absurdly juvenile humour, as if sheepishly fishing for laughs to distract from the overwhelming stupidity. Suffice to say, humping dogs, robot testicles and a very out of place thong joke are hardly adequate substitutes for narrative. Even the jaw dropping special effects which propelled the first film feel somewhat stale, with many battles shown in jittery close ups preventing the viewer from fully drinking in the gloriously realised spectacle.
Similarly, while one would be foolish to pursue such fare for the sake of quality acting, the collection of Bay's actors manage to be even worse this time around. Shia LaBeouf substitutes aspiring hip mumbling and whining for charisma as harried protagonist Witwicky, coming across as simply annoying and often utterly irrelevant to the plot. Similarly, Megan Fox is even more overtly reduced to eye candy than previously, with no characterisation apart from leering attempts at being cool or seductive. John Turturro at least operates under fewer delusions of seriousness than the last film, going wildly but amusingly over the top and having a lot more fun with his character. As such, it is up to a screeching Ramon Rodriguez to derail the film even further with an astonishingly irritating and pointless attempt at comic relief, leaving the viewer continually praying he is at least granted a cathartic brutal death by Decepticon. While the return of Peter Cullen sonorous tones and Hugo Weaving's snarls as robotic rivals Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively are a high point, both of their characters are granted insufficient time to punctuate their deathly binary, making the emotional centre of the film feel even more imbalanced.
While any sensible viewer would correctly expect the film to be cheesy, dumb and politically correct in every possible way, what surprises is the film's soulless lack of fun factor, with all components amplified to such garish levels that it transcends into a world of sensations, the viewer utterly overwhelmed by the cacophonous excess of spectacle being thrust in their face. Demented but hardly entertaining, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an entirely vacuous spectacle, rendered nearly redundant by its predecessor, and making it only worth viewing for those desperately craving vastly more of the same.
-3/10