Less a meditation on the human condition than a 2 ½-hour commercial for Hasbro and Chevy, master blaster Michael Bay‘s super-sized sequel to 2007′s Transformers is as loud, ludicrous, bombastic–and entertaining–as anything he’s ever done.
Shia LaBeouf returns as the smart-alecky hero who, along with gorgeous girlfriend Megan Fox, military dudes Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson, and former government man John Turturro, once again gets dragged into helping the good-guy half of the titular alien robots thwart the planet-destroying plans of the bad-guy half.
I won’t deny that this is supremely silly stuff, or that Bay ill-advisedly treats it as a Shakespearean tragedy, complete with a bloated running time and such amusingly portentous dialogue as “Fate rarely calls on us at a moment of our choosing.”
But I enjoy Bay’s films precisely because they’re excessive, and BIG, and this one more than fits the bill on both counts. It’s got hot cars, macho attitude, thundering robotic rumbles, heaps of beautifully-shot, large-scale destruction and loads of massive explosions and majestic CGI creations. Especially cool is the gargantuan bad-guy robot made up of construction machines.
The only person you’ll actually remember is in this thing is probably the fidgety LaBeouf, mainly because he’s in the most scenes, while Fox rocks tight jeans and looks great outrunning fireballs. Turturro still works as the comic relief, Duhamel mainly plays with guns and Gibson merely glares, utters lines like “This ain’t good” and pleads for air support every chance he gets.
The cries of racial insensitivity over a pair of twin good-guy robots prove moot, as the characters’ incessant chattering and bickering grated on me to no end. But I was very happy to still hear Peter Cullen as the voice of main good-guy robot Optimus Prime, a duty he also performed in the animated ’80s TV show and first flick. His voicing of the character is the best thing about the franchise.
If anything, the film proves to me that Bay is truly the Cecil B. DeMille of our times, a man who skillfully orchestrates beguiling big-budget behemoths that are long on looks but short on intelligence and humanity. I don’t think that makes him a bad person. He just wants to entertain, even if it involves gigantic shape-changing robots from outer space. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi
Rated PG-13
DVD Release Date: 10/20/09
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