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Most reasonable people know what to expect walking in to a Michael Bay movie. In the case of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, most reasonable people know that the film isn’t going to be an intricate web of intrigue, plot and character development. The point of this 2009 blockbuster is, simply put, to blow stuff up with lots of CGI and robot action.

2007’s Transformers surprised me with its lack of action and insistence on following its two lead characters around through a forced romantic relationship. This time out, Bay ups the ante with the robot action but presents a spiral of idiocy that is so ludicrous, so ridiculous, so poorly-rendered, so bland, so tedious, and so awful that I have no problem labelling Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.

Shia LaBeouf is back as Sam Witwicky and he’s off to college, giving Bay a chance to do up his college fantasy shtick in early scenes that mirror American Pie complete with misplaced raunchy humour. Of course, in leaving for college Sam leaves behind his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), who is initially presented bending over a motorcycle in jean shorts. Her purpose in the movie is abundantly clear from the outset.

Anywho, Sam also leaves behind Bumblebee and has been letting the Autobots fight their own wars as part of an organization with the United States federal government and President Barack Obama. Bay falls short of offering us an Obamabot, but he does mention the President by name when all hell breaks loose. The Autobots are fighting the Decepticons, rooting them out as though searching for Saddam Hussein. But the “plot” is about to thicken when Sam, on his way out the door to school, discovers that he still has a shard of the AllSpark in his pocket. Oops.

This leads the Decepticons back into action and brings about the appearance of The Fallen, a former Autobot gone bad, and a plot to destroy the Earth once more. Sam is, of course, the key to their plot as handing the AllSpark shard gave him the mental capacity to reproduce strange Cybertronian symbols. Along for the ride is his new college roommate Leo (Ramón Rodríguez) and many of the usual suspects from the first movie.

Now it’s probably pointless to suggest that the acting is awful and that the plot development is convoluted, bloated and stupid, but I’m going to anyway. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, is, after all, still a movie and it deserves to be critiqued on the basis that it attempts to characterize itself as a film and not a mere toy commercial. LaBeouf is awful, Fox is awful and looks absolutely and understandably bored and manipulated, and the remaining cast of character is inconsequential and unnecessary.

Take the interactions between Sam and his parents, Ron (Kevin Dunn) and Judy (Julie White), as a start. Their scenes in this movie are awful, among the worst I’ve ever seen, and consist of Judy eating a pot brownie and tackling a guy throwing a Frisbee and the usual unnecessary sex dialogue that one would expect Eugene Levy to offer to Jason Biggs. Bay seems confused about what movie he’s making, which is reinforced by the fact that Sam’s roommate actually has a Bad Boys 2 poster on his wall.

Megan Fox and every female character in the movie, save for the lunatic mother figure of Judy, is used as a sex object in virtually the same unimaginative fashion. Bay comes across like a moronic porn director, getting Fox to shove her ass out as far as possible and panning up and down her form as she changes clothes. His direction of Alice (Isabel Lucas) is the same. The problem is that the output isn’t the least bit sexy; it’s entirely and ridiculously annoying.

The CGI is probably pretty good, I guess, but there’s absolutely no cohesion to the action sequences and they are incredibly hard to follow. Bay just shoots things poorly, switching around between dumb slo-mo shots and his idiotic upward-swirling crap shots with no rhyme or reason. On top of it all, he piles on so much unnecessary music and Green Day/Linkin Park song clips that it’s hard not to chuckle. Is “21 Guns” supposed to be Megan Fox’s theme song?

I’ve already spent more time talking about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen than I would have liked, but I truly cannot emphasize this movie’s awfulness enough. It is two-and-a-half hours of the most bloated crap I have ever seen on screen and there are no redeeming qualities to be found. None. My only consolation is that I didn’t pay for it, but from the looks of the box office receipts, more than enough people already did.

0/10

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