Terrible, Truly Terrible

Rating: 2/10 (26 June 2009)

We've had a string of pretty bad movies as of late... Twilight, of course, with the resounding theme of "People in General are Stupid Morons", and Wolverine, which was less like a movie with plot holes and more like a giant plot hole with bits of movie floating around in it, just to name two. But Transformers 2... Good Lord.
A note to Hollywood film makers: provocative shots of Megan Fox accompanied by a script that is 80% stupid sex jokes does not a decent movie make, and it does not make up for a painful lack of original writing and realistic dialog. Seriously, Transformers 2 was nothing more than a cliché-salad with lots of explosions and debris flying about in the mix. Every remotely intelligible spoken line was either a tired cliché (seriously, did the villains really just say, "This isn't over!", seriously? And did the cantankerous veteran robot really just say, "I'm getting too old for this crap?") or a cheap, dirty sex joke (Oh, look, a running gag where a little chihuahua is *ahem* "dominating" the other one. And if that's not enough, lets have a gag where a small robot humps Megan Fox's leg, that ought to be good for a laugh. How about a gag where Megan Fox falls from the sky and lands face-down on a male character's crotch? Pure gold.). Every other line was spoken so quickly or with so many sound effects going on in the background that you couldn't hear it, and my guess is it was probably another round of clichéd sex jokes, anyway, so I guess I wasn't missing much.
I'm not exactly sure what today's adolescent generation expects of their coming college years, but if they expect that Michael Bay's representation that every single college girl will be falling over herself to jump into bed with them and college professors will conduct riveting Astronomy lectures using phrases like "heated, passionate, thrusting Orion and fair, seductive, nubile Virgo", they are going to be sorely disappointed. This just wasn't funny! It was a poor parody at best, and in a movie that was not intended as parody, it was just poor, cheap, writing that the director hoped would score some points with the masses.
Besides the painfully pedestrian and entirely unfunny "comedy", the first hour of the movie was a lot of stupid and mostly meaningless dialog fired between characters so rapidly you'd think the writers never heard the phrase "Take a beat" or "Pause". The last hour of the movie was a senselessly chaotic mishmash of explosions and robot parts flying around, and I think there MIGHT have been a plot point mixed in there somewhere, but honestly I was too overwhelmed by the amount of unidentifiable debris fighting for attention on the screen. When I go to a Michael Bay film I at least expect some worthwhile special effects and actions sequences, but for this film I might as well have just gone out, bought some Transformers toys, stuck them in the blender and watched them puree for an hour. At least then I might have had some idea which robot parts belonged to who and, incidentally, which side was winning.
Overall, this was one of the most disappointing recreations of our favorite childhood cartoons I have seen come out of Hollywood yet. For the love of all that is pure and good, I pray that movie-goers will start demanding better from the movie directors and producers and stop accepting such cheap, worthless imitation.