If Transformers is an egregious piece of shit, which I believe we all know it is, then Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is the strange and frightening pervert fetishist who masturbates to internet videos of that piece of shit. Whatever the first film did badly, the second film endeavors to do at an alarmingly worse level.
The first movie, the victim of awful over-direction, bad concepts, and one of the worst scripts in the history of time, is somehow made even worse in this limp sub-adaptation. Whatever charm the first film had before the robots started talking and journeying into comic relief, or whatever internal logic the first movie had in its incomprehensible, fucktarded "vending machines turn into killer robots with missile launchers"... Well, those things are trod upon, heavily, by the second movie. "We can rebuild it," they say. "We can make it dumber, louder, more abrasive." And, hence, they do.
Uncomfortable moments of sneaking 30-foot robots and mechanical urination jokes turn into characters whose only purpose is to be offensive and unfunny. A set of minstrel show-like twin robots who would serve no conceivable purpose in a war (and look surprisingly like the retarded gremlin in Gremlins 2) are dead weight around the plot's neck for most of the movie. Because who would you leave to protect someone if not a couple of brain damaged idiots with no fighting skills?
And whatever you thought of the first movie's "plot" about the MacGuffin... oh, I mean Cube... and its ability to turn inanimate objects into cutesy death robots, well, this movie doesn't even have that level of class. It's just a big MMA brawl between robots that you can't tell apart. And you can never even quite tell what's going on, as the robots are too detailed to comprehend what they look like when they're standing completely still and, when they're moving, you might as well just be watching footage of cars crashing into each other through a telescope.
Aside from these banal upgrades to the first movie, there's something inherently wrong with the fact that several of the robots in the first film were killed in a matter of seconds by Optimus Prime or Megatron, no hope for their survival whatsoever. Yet in this piece of trash, robots are torn limb from limb and blithely stick their appendages back on after the fight's over, almost no real sense of danger for good guy or bad guy, as Starscream, the revived Megatron, Optimus Prime, everyone, takes massive damage that would have laid them dead in the first film and just shrug it off, destroying whatever sense of deadly combat the movies had (which was very little to begin with).
They manage to wedge most the first film's actors back in. No, not the useful people, like Jon Voight, Anthony Anderson and Rachael Taylor. No, we get back LaBeouf and Fox, of course, along with the Witwicky family, who appear in far too much of the movie for no good reason, other than to provide more comic relief, as apparently the Transformers franchise is nothing if not a vehicle for endless slapstick jokes. John Tuturro comes back to piss on his career some more, but actually has more to do in this film and comes off better than he did in the first, not that this is saying much. And the soldiers, as it isn't a Bay film without military fetishism, return, despite the fact that they were the most hollow, pointless part of the first movie. So, now, for some unknown reason the Autobots are aligned with the U.S. government and work as a team to fight the Decepticons, despite the fact that the only purpose the military serves is to scream, run, get blown up, and die at the hands of said Decepticons. And, then, the bureaucrats get involved, as they always do in these badly-written pieces of shit, and the President flexes his authority to kick the Autobots off the planet because, well, apparently the U.S. is in charge of the Earth. Be sure to alert all the other countries in the world that we get to make the rules for all alien relations in the future and can say when they're no longer wanted on our globe, no matter how easily they could just topple our government and kill us all. Because we called both "dibs" and "shotgun". No backsies. So we make the rules.
Add to this robots that can turn into people (why didn't they just send those from the beginning to get the damned cube and skip the ones that turn into cars and planes?), tiny robots doing stupid bullshit (including the humping of legs), and a geriatric Jetfire, who talks like a pirate, has a metal beard and causes everyone that remembers the Robotech rip-off that was the Jetfire of the 80's to sigh and shake their heads while Shia and Megan go on what is basically a big, retarded video game keyhunt to bring back Optimus Prime from the dead so he can magically defeat The Fallen, a generic but powerful pharaoh-looking robot, despite the fact that Optimus got his ass thoroughly kicked by three much weaker foes earlier in the film. But, we find out, Transformers can magically take the body parts of their dead friends and foes and reconstruct themselves into super-Transformers. I guess they just pulled that out of their asses when they got to the last 20 pages of the script and realized they had no ending.
You'll notice I'm not really telling you anything about the actual plot, because there isn't really much one to speak of. Oh, it's not as confusing as many critics and reviewers made it out to be. It's just pointless and hollow. And here's the ultimate dirty secret that no one else is telling you: the movie is fucking boring. Despite the fact that the movie is nothing more than a 2 1/2 hour fight scene or a commercial for Ford and penis enlargement pills, everything that happens feels flat and soulless. I found myself bored out of my mind, waiting for the ending by an hour in. Of course, up to that point, I had only been disgusted and angry that I was watching such a foul and absurd abortion of a film, devoid of anything close to plot, character, or substance that didn't seem somehow less impressive than a terribly-written 1980's children's cartoon that I found embarassing by the age of 10.
I suppose the movie looks good, though if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars filming it, I can't imagine it'll look like shit. It is, of course, buried in cliches, visually incomprehensible in its constant explosions and wrestling, gunfighting Erector sets, and is swathed in annoyingly long sections of slow-motion. Never has more happened on film that you cared less about.
The acting isn't worth mentioning, as nothing being delivered is worthwhile, therefore it's almost impossible to judge by any standard that wouldn't have you condemn everyone involved to immediate death. I must credit Megan Fox with being right about this wretched pile of shit, despite her lambasting by the nerd backlash and Michael Bay's filmmaking fuckbuddies. Everything Bay touches is perverted and grotesque and I'm left to wish he'd rape a young girl (if he hasn't already) and have to flee the country to avoid extradition for a few decades.
And the script... Oh, that script. If you told me it was actually written down on paper, I almost wouldn't believe you. Surely they just made it up as they went along, in between shooting scenes of explosions, before coating everything in a sheen of CGI robot cum. But, no, the constant ruiners of film, Orci and Kurtzman, who wrote the shit that was Mission: Impossible III, The Legend Of Zorro, Transformers and "Fringe", are yet again responsible for this inane foray into vapid pointlessness. I should point out that their script for Star Trek wasn't even particularly good and the only reason that film worked was the earnest work of the actors, definitely not the hodgepodge of confusing bullshit that they called a story. I think it'd be in everyone's best interest if we run Orci & Kurtzman out of the fucking movie industry on a rail. Or perhaps hang them both. I'm not picky. Anything that prevents us from watching another one of these neon abortions that looks like a child banging their toys together while a gas station explodes in the background.
Watch only in the case of needed self-loathing.
