Two years after Megatron [Hugo Weaving] has been defeated and the all spark destroyed we find ourselves back at the Witwicky’s home as Sam [Shia LaBeouf] prepares to leave for college. The Autobots and the US military has made an alliance to help fight all the dispersed Decepticons across Earth. After a huge battle with a decepticon in Shanghai Optimus Prime [Peter Cullen] receives a warning that The Fallen [Tony Todd] is coming to take over this world.
So the plot, as most will tell me, is irrelevant for these films. Once Michael Bay is attached stop expecting anything. However, I must respectfully disagree. Now please don’t misunderstand me. When I say that I disagree I don’t mean that I expect Mr. Bay to give me a grade A plot that would take a team from NASA a week to unravel but rather something simple and half understandable. Simply put, give me a reason why our protagonist is going from point A to point B other than so we can see another ginormous fight scene and Michael Bay tends to give me at least that much. Here however he decided to forget it at the door, and I’m assuming he intended you to check all form of sense there as well.
This movie decided to assault my membrane for a whole of 150 minutes. This movie was way too long. For a dumb action film I don’t need that much movie. You’ve always heard your mother tell you that too much of anything is bad for you. Well Mr. Bay too much CGI, too much retardedness, too much incoherent plot, too much ridiculous action is not good for your health. I feel like if I see another robot I’m going to fall over from dizziness.
Michael Bay is my typical choice for a five year old child who was given too many toys as a child and at the same time had a camera around. I feel that if he decided to film all the shots where we had a slow motion shot of a character doing something while to deep instrumentals with the sun in the distance giving off more annoying lens flare like effects than Star Trek did. The movie would be at least 40 minutes shorter if he had just skipped all the slow motion in the movie, and better for it. After twenty minutes into the movie I was already tired of seeing it and bored.
The acting was way over the top for me. Shia’s role seemed to involve three things: running away, shouting for Optimus or Bumblebee and looking like he jizzed his pants while spouting random gibberish. One of my biggest complaints, character wise, comes from Judy Witwicky [Julie White]. Mrs. Witwicky went on vacation way too early and became a horny teenager for the entire first half of the movie, I almost went insane when she was on the college campus and decided to get high from some special brownies.
Now onto the section that all of you are waiting to hear about, the action. The action in this movie is exactly what all of you want, horribly shot scenes where you can barely make out which robot is hitting which. Sometimes you have to wait to see which one falls like a 60s Japanese samurai film just to confirm what happened in the fight. What Michael Bay does is he goes out in the woods, desert, suburbs and runs through a random scenery with his camera and then adds the CGI fight between Optimus and random decepticon and then all of the crowd applauds while I sit there wondering what just happened.
Something that really shocked me while watching this movie was the rating. Was this really a PG-13 movie? In Jamaica it received an A-16 rating which I felt was more appropriate. The movie contained a lot of profanity. Most of the colourful language came from Skids and Mudflap. In the movie you will hear the words fuck, shit and pussy. I think it is really retarded that the MPAA’s guidelines state that if a movie uses the word fuck more than twice it is automatically an R rated film but it seems they can say shit as many times as they want without a problem. When I heard the autobots call Leo [Ramon Rodriguez] a pussy I was really shocked, I can’t remember if I’ve ever heard that word used like that in a PG-13 film and it just seems like something that the conservatives out there who make all these dumb guidelines wouldn’t want their 13 year old children hearing from a loveable robot that kicks ass.
One thing that definitely did not sit well with me was Bay’s need to force some really dumb slapstick comedy into the movie. Whenever robots were on screen one of two things was occurring: a huge fight scene; or a retardedly silly comedy scene. One example of this is where a decpeticon is in the garage trying to steal the all spark sliver from Mikaela [Megan Fox] and the robot fell into rat traps, made snarky remarks to Mikaela’s dog and also made sexual jokes at Mikaela herself. Bay does this throughout the film and it just doesn’t work for me.
Another point that I guess I should talk about is the so called ‘racist’ characters introduced in the movie, Skids [Tom Kenny] and Mudflap [Reno Wilson]. Now I can understand why people would be upset about these characters. They definitely play up the stereotype of the younger African American who is all jacked up on hip-hop and not very interested in much else. It may even seem like that they were based on characters that you would find in many music videos on BET or something like that. However, I think that it doesn’t go that far. The characters are annoying and at times you will want to kick them in the groin, and yes apparently robots have balls to be kicked. However, to call them racist is a bit much. So I will leave them classified as a bad joke and not much more than that.
In the end this sequel is ridiculously worse than the first and is really stupid. One of the questions I asked myself as I left the theatre was if Bad Boys 2 was better or worse than this movie. One thing that’s for sure, Terminator Salvation is better than this movie. I’ll leave you with that and say this movie should be avoided at all costs and if at all only worth checking out on cable when it hits the movie channels.
IMDB says 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 20%
I say 2.5/10
I too share some of your views on this disappointing Transformers sequel. -_-
I blogged my review a few days ago, check it out.
http://www.jamaipanese.com/transformers-revenge-o…
Great breakdown!
Although I have to disagree with the final statement of avoiding it at all costs. Granted it's not Bay's best film and truly is the definition of an over blown popcorn flick but at the end of the day, I found it fairly entertaining.
I gotta say there are several reviews from you I disagreed with (giving kudos to some you trashed or raising my eyebrow for some you found entertaining) but DANG this review spot on… same so I felt watching this…
and i aint no CRITIC… i watch movies to pass time… and be entertained… this one made me yawn..
i glad i listened to my instincts and bootlegged
2 / 10
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