Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay may be one of the most polarizing entertainers on the planet. The shamelessly self-promoting action director behind such films as The Rock, Armageddon, and Bad Boys receives relatively equal parts vitriolic hatred and glowing adoration from his armies of detractors and fans. There are those who accuse Bay of sucking the soul out of action cinema and approaching filmmaking as an exercise in spending lots of money on explosions. And there are those who see Bay as an action movie revolutionary, a man whose singular vision has transformed the face of modern action cinema. No matter where you may stand on the Bay-related battlefield, it is safe to say that Bay's latest picture, the blockbuster sequel Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is his biggest and most carelessly unchained work to date.

While I generally find myself on the side of the Bay haters (I think that Bad Boys II and The Island are truly awful movies and the first Transformers was a considerable disappointment), I occasionally give in and let his larger-than-life vision take hold of my imagination. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I cannot help but be in awe of the crazed carnage that he has hurled onto the big screen. The sheer immensity of this movie is astonishing, with action sequences that feel so big that you can practically see them spilling off the edges of the frame. It is as though Bay's fictional world is on the verge of invading our own. For pure spectacle, this movie is a stunning achievement.

But while spectacle is what Bay does incredibly well, storytelling is not one of his strong suits. Bay's biggest problem as a filmmaker is that he sees every character as a malleable pawn simply enabling the progression of the bigger picture. He never seems to care very much about anyone or anything. He just wants to blow stuff up and have some fun with his very expensive collection of digital toys.

Even with his obvious disinterest in the human beings that populate his world, he still manages to insert a few moments of treacly drama into the story. And every time he ventures into sentimental territory, he ensures that those moments fall flat. The dramatic scenes in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen are so clichéd, so laughably manufactured, that it makes me wonder if the guy has ever felt an actual emotion.

Bay's lack of storytelling prowess filters down to writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the pair who wrote the sparkling script for last month's Star Trek), who have compiled a heap of scrap metal and disguised the mess as a plot. There are pieces of story flying in from every corner of the screen, but none of it adds up to much more than an excuse to move from Action Sequence A to Action Sequence B.

The main plot thread is once again concerned with unlikely hero Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf, who at least tries hard to make some sense of his nearly non-existent character arc), his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox, whose oft-mentioned beauty is supposed to make up for her lack of acting ability), and the giant transforming Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen, whose soothing tone is one of the nicest sounds in the movie). When we meet up with Sam early in the movie, he is off to college and looking to distance himself from any more giant robot battles. But it isn't long before his buddy Optimus comes calling for his help when a mysterious evil Transformer known as The Fallen appears to be headed to Earth.

Because this is a Michael Bay movie, the various plot threads extend to the military and involve lots of talk about the President. Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel reprise their roles as the two soldiers with the most robot-fighting experience and neither actor has much more to do than what was given to them in the first movie. They bark orders and engage in military speak, while flashing their big guns and posing for the camera. Bay's love for the military knows no bounds and the repetition of the military theme has long since grown old.

So the script is a total bust, as is most of the cast, but Bay tries his hardest to overcome the movie's missing pieces with that aforementioned spectacle. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen takes audiences from Shanghai to New York to Paris to Egypt. The gargantuan list of locales lends the movie a sense of global connection that Bay is so often attempting to achieve. Without a solid script to keep the plot moving in an engaging manner, this globe-trotting aspect of the story does little but increase the movie's travel budget. But there is still something uniquely powerful about a movie being so big that it has to stretch to different spaces of the world.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a constant tug-of-war between the good and the bad. The hollow script and mostly goofy acting pull the movie down, but the massive scope of the picture and the brilliant, uncompromising special effects work (among the best I have ever seen) do their best to drag the movie back to the surface. Ultimately, the tie breaker is the movie's juvenile comedy, which is sadly unforgivable in its pitiful lack of imagination. Dogs hump each other, robots spout curse words (always within the acceptable limits of PG-13), and a pair of idiotic twin robots named Mudflap and Skids (the movie's most grating comic relief) are among the most despicably racist creatures in modern entertainment.

After all these years, Michael Bay really hasn't changed very much at all. He still uses the same mixture of bad jokes and orchestrated mayhem that he has been toying with for his entire career. But for everything good and bad about Bay the filmmaker, he remains an intriguing showman in a class all his own. Some may call that class terrible, while others will hail it as great, but either way, all of Bay's abilities are on display in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with an energy that is so utterly exhausting that it deserves to be experienced in front of a big screen. Bay receives incredible help from the effects team at Industrial Light and Magic and from composer Steve Jablonsky, whose score features a bombastic boom that perfectly matches Bay's direction. But in the end, this is Bay's creation, a warped world of twisted metal and clanging noise that comes together, rather awkwardly, to spell blockbuster.