Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Review

Even conceiving of a movie bigger, dumber and louder than the first Transformers would be beyond most filmmakers, but not Michael Bay. Bay’s is a cinema on steroids, pursuing a body-builder’s dream of eternal growth -- it must bulge constantly outward, veins popping like twigs from its ever-flexed biceps.

Eternal growth is his box-office aim too, and with this franchise, likely to beat all comers at the tills this summer, he may just have found it. Sadly, this doesn’t mean Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is any good, exactly. It’s just big.

A key sequence in this musclebound sequel illustrates Bay’s size-queen philosophy. One behemoth of a vehicle starts to change into a robot, bolts on a concrete mixer and a few outlying trucks, and they all whirr and clank upwards to form an uber-uber-uber-robot, a Godzilla of robots, which proceeds to vacuum up half the Middle East. You think: great special effects, but also: why?

There’s never any real why, for all the tranches of brain-rotting exposition about a Decepticon comeback and some energy-containing key called “The Matrix of Leadership” buried near the Pyramids. Only in a Bay film is a key also a matrix, and the comic relief an extra reason to pack paracetamol.

You could always watch “An Inconvenient Truth” while hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.

To me, hitting myself in the head with a hammer would be preferable to watching Al Gore's movie. But watching a "Transformers" movie would be virtually identical to hitting myself in the head with a hammer.

I'm not a film snob, but I can't stand overblown, overbudget, loud, brainless summer movies that are all CGI explosions and no script. I can even pinpoint the exact moment I swore off dumb summer action movies. I had to kill a couple of hours while waiting for my wife, so I got out of the Texas heat by going into a dollar theater. The only thing starting at the right time was "Gone in 60 Seconds" with Nicolas Cage. By the time that finally ended, I decided that I'd never again waste two hours of my life on noisy crap. I'm just getting too old to throw away that much time and get nothing in return but an earache.

BTW, I love "Citizen Kane," because it's a great movie with one of the most quotable scripts ever written. But I also thought "My Life in Ruins" was pretty cute, and the critics HATED that.

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