Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay's latest suck-fest is charmless, derivative, and about an hour too long. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the mega-budget sequel to the 2007 toy-inspired blockbuster. It's Paramount's summer tent-pole, and it looks set to be one of the season's biggest hits, despite being little more than . . . noise. Coming out the theater, you feel like you've been watching silverware get mixed in a blender for nearly three hours.

The effects are jaw-dropping--some of ILM's best work ever. Cars transform into giant robots that crash through buildings and speed down highways without the slightest clue there is trickery involved. Completely, utterly seamless. All that visual splendor is wasted, though, on an amateurish script that makes no sense. The film just flows along--LaBeouf goes to college and all hell breaks loose--while Bay throws more and more CGI chases at us until we start to suffer from sensory overload near the first hour mark.

Shiah LaBeouf is still a credible, affable Everyman we want to cheer for, and his ridiculously hot, Maxim cover-ish girlfriend (Megan Fox) is pleasant eye candy. There is nothing wrong with making a film based on action-figures or toys. Movie ideas can spring from any source. It's just that Michael Bay is a bad director. He would make a great photographer; he knows how to frame cool images. But the stuff that makes cinema cinematic--such as suspense, drama, mise en scene, atmosphere, etc? He doesn't have a clue.

Take his action scenes. Sure, they look stylish when you see still frames of them, but when you actually watch them in motion, they lack visual logic and suspense. Bay's car chases are fun to look at, but after a while you find yourself texting or checking the time because you don't care who is chasing who, or why. Bay's chases do not engage you the way the action scenes in The Matrix or The French Connection or Raiders of the Lost Ark do.

Transformers has all the ingredients for a movie I would have loved as a boy. I love car chases and gun fights and non-stop action. But when I got older I realized those same ingredients could be found in movies that were actually good. Wall-to-wall action and coherent storytelling are not mutually exclusive. Kids deserve movies that have both.