Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Somehow my son missed the first ‘Transformers’ flick, a movie I reported via opinion in these very pages that I thought wasn’t all that great but still a must see for the spectacle of it all. Since I own that movie on defunct HD-DVD - the Look and Sound of Perfect, I showed it to the boy in prep for seeing this flick ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’. Revisiting that first movie it turns out that it was even stupider than I remember, highlighted by a scene I completely missed the first time around when Josh Dushamel’s character of Captain Lennox, after retrieving the Allspark, tells his crew ‘Let’s hide it in the city!’ Exactly. Let’s hide this thing being pursued by a battalion of 200 foot murderous talking robots in the most densely populated area on earth. An Elementary School wasn’t available? All things considered however I liked that movie, especially when compared to director Michael Bay’s super loud, super explosive, super busy, super silly, super stupid sequel which is going to make so much money that an even dumber third movie is probably being shot even as we speak.

A couple years after the events of the first movie Optimus (voiced by Peter Cullen) and his crew of Autobots working with the freshly promoted Major Lennox cruise the world searching for wayward Decepticons as witnessed in what will certainly be a staple of these films, the EXPLOSIVE

opening sequence. This Decepticon menace is quashed but not without 8.6 billion dollars of property damage to Shanghai causing the gub-ment to want to shut down Optimus and them and I guess handle the occasional 200 foot murderous talking robot on their own.

Meanwhile Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is leaving his terminally tan girl Mikaela (Megan Fox) to run off to college but before he makes it out of the door he finds a random piece of the Allspark stuck to his jacket which falls into the kitchen an brings the appliances to life ‘Gremlins’ style. One would think that finding a piece of this stuff, which was ‘this close’ to destroying the world is a very bad thing and as such maybe it should be given to the government or perhaps Optimus should be told about this. No, let’s give it to the hot girlfriend because she’s tan and wears short shorts. Makes sense to me.

So Sam runs off to college where weird stuff starts to happen to him. Turns out the Allspark bows down to the laws of thermodynamics in that it cannot be created or destroyed but merely transferred. This leads to an onslaught of Decpticons to Earth to acquire where this thing has been transferred to and that would be to Sam Witwicky’s brain. Or not. You see the King of the Decpticons known as The Fallen (Tony Todd) has relayed this fact to a resurrected Megatron (Hugo Weaving) but actually Sam’s brain just holds a map to some super device which can destroy our sun. So now it’s up to Sam, with the help of Major Lennox, his soldiers and the surviving Autobot’s to try to keep Sam’s brain safe and sound because the destruction of our planet is imminent and the one thing that can save us is kind of dead right now. Sucks to be human.

There is not enough time in the day to describe the 150 minute mess of a movie that is ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’. I don’t know if Director Michael Bay realized this but the dorm room poster of his ‘Bad Boys II’ is a damn near perfect example of what this movie ended up being. ‘Bad Boys’ was an enjoyably silly but fun action flick where the sequel to that movie was an overblown loud disastrous mess. Same here, but I will say that this sequel was more enjoyable than ‘Bad Boys II’. I realize that a universe that features giant talking robots doesn’t make sense right off the bat but one would think that even in a fantasy world certain rules of basic common sense would still apply. The longer this movie went on the louder it got, the more explosive it became and the ridiculous meter rose to the levels of almost complete exasperation. The crown jewel of this film is Sam’s foot race across two miles of Egyptian desert, with his tanned blue eyed girlfriend in tow, to get a particular device to the fallen Optimus Prime. It is quite the spectacle with explosions, giant robot battles, pyramid destruction, AWAC’s, jets, tanks… you name it baby, it was there. However… this two mile foot race of a college freshman outrunning explosion after explosion could’ve been avoided if he’d just jumped into his yellow Camaro. A Camaro with a Cybotron infused V-8 could probably go two miles in about 45 seconds. Bumblebee was conspicuously absent throughout this entire sequence but then if Sam had just jumped into the ride then the boy wouldn’t have become a man and yada yada yada.

I’m thinking if Mr. Bay had dedicated as much time into the rest of his movie as he dedicated the time into clever ways of shooting Megan Fox then this would’ve been the freaking Godfather of summer action flicks. Watch Megan bend over, watch Megan stretch, watch Megan get tanner with each passing minute, watch Megan move in slow mo. It’s a good thing that slow motion is relatively inexpensive effect otherwise this movie’s already bloated 200 million dollar budget would’ve topped out at a cool billion. If I never see another slo-mo effect again, it will be too soon.

No my friends, I did not like this movie all that much. ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’ was two and a half hours of sound of fury amounting up to absolutely nothing. Though I wasn’t madly in love the first movie there’s no way I would’ve missed it. This I could’ve missed.