Regardless of how fondly the franchise is remembered by People of a Certain Age, Transformers has always represented the crassest, most craven rung of the entertainment industry. The original cartoon series existed purely to shift toy cars – toy cars that could niftily morph into robots – but toy cars, nonetheless.
It seems only fitting that the Transformers movie empire – “In association with Hasbro” – has found itself under the stewardship of Michael Bay, the trashiest blockbuster merchant in all Hollywood. Mr. Bay, a director who, in cinematic terms, can’t play a note but who does know how to turn the amp up to 11, did a decent enough job on the 2007 film. What could go wrong?
Well, quite a bit actually. As a sequel, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen suffers terribly from More Of The Same Syndrome, a dire affliction known to befall productions that spend too much time listening to bloody focus groups. So, in the first film we get Megan Fox dry humping a car. But now here’s Megan dry-humping a bike, shaking her hair out of motorcycle helmet in slow motion and pouting with lips that seem to have expanded since the first movie. Here’s Shia LaBeouf being even more adorably awkward around his comedy parents. He’s literally bursting with frustration. See! They’re giving people what they want.
Oh dear. If only the movieverse worked that way. The trouble with sticking to a successful formula is that an awful lot can get lost in the translation. The comedy shtick that punctuated the first installment feels forced here. The one-liners – “Damn, I’m good”, “Punk ass Decepticon” – must have read “insert witty one-liner here” on the actual screenplay. It would be an understatement to say that the new merchandise – a souped-up Megatron and a new Gremlin breed – is crowbarred into the mix.
Unhappily, the film never amounts to more than a Bunch of Stuff. See there’s this ancient Decepticon call Fallen and he’s like, hanging around the earth for millennia and stuff. And there’s this Tomb of the Primes and a Matrix key that has the power of the All Spark. Or maybe the power is within us all? Or something. It all gets so confusing that one character – loveable buffoon John Tuturro - almost breaks down on screen: “Beginning. Middle. End. Facts. Plot. Tell us”, he pleads. We know! We know!
Shia LaBeouf, as ever, looks like a proper movie star and keeps the chatter up, but he and the rest of the cast have nothing to do for Revenge Of The Fallen’s terminable last hour, a big robot-on-robot mash-up set against the pyramids. It’s spectacular, of course, but virtually impenetrable and utterly monotonous, like getting caught playing with a giant android and then being forced to smoke an entire box of them. By the end, even the explosions have lost all meaning.