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Written by Jason Green Wednesday, 24 June 2009 15:04

Director Michael Bay is known for big, dumb action movies. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may just be his biggest, dumbest movie yet.

Director Michael Bay is known for big, dumb action movies (Armageddon, Bad Boys). Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen may just be his biggest, dumbest movie yet.

Joining the action two years after the first film, the Autobots have formed an alliance with humanity, working with a super-secret multinational military force code-named NEST. Led by the human Major William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and the robot Optimus Prime (original Optimus voice Peter Cullen), NEST's mission is to prevent the resurgence of the evil Decepticon forces, who are still reeling from their defeat in the first film. With peace more or less obtained, everygeek hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) has moved on to more human concerns, like trying to assuage his worried parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) and keep his impossibly hot girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) as he heads off to his freshman year of college. While packing, Sam stumbles upon a shard of the All-Spark (the first movie's MacGuffin), which infects his brain and causes him to start seeing mysterious visions of symbols in the Transformers' alien language. Undaunted by his visions, Sam heads off to college, where he rooms up with Leo (Ramon Rodriguez), a conspiracy theorist blogger trying to get to the bottom of the mysterious unexplained giant robot sightings that keep happening all over the world (because the Transformers are still a secret, ya see). But with the physical shard at Mikaela's and the metaphysical shard in Sam's head, both find themselves targets of attacks from the Decepticons, who are so strengthened from the resurrection of their leader Megatron (Hugo Weaving) that they manage to kill the powerhouse Optimus but not the fleshy nerd he was protecting. From here, things get complicated fast, so I'll summarize: Megatron has a master named the Fallen, the Fallen has a big bad weapon that can blow up the sun, only Sam can solve the puzzle to resurrect Optimus, and only Optimus can stop the Fallen and, thus, save the world.

Bay seems bound and determined to outdo himself with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, as every single piece of the film strives to be bigger and better that the first one: there's even more action, even more comedy, even more robots, even more cheesecake, even more plot threads. But more isn't always necessarily a good thing. The action can be breath-taking, but more often than not, Bay becomes so enamored with showing off what he can do with the special effects that they end up hindering more than helping. Each Transformer is designed to the minutest detail, but Bay insists on circling the camera around them as they transform, the flurry of detailed actions becoming an indistinct and unimpressive blur. Fortunately, he seems to have stolen a few moves from Zak Snyder's playbook, throwing insta-slow-mo into the fight scenes that allow the action to pause just long enough to say "Wow, this is pretty cool looking." Those moments are, unfortunately, not nearly frequent enough.

The film is much funnier than its predecessor and most action movies in general, if only because it tosses out jokes with such regularity that a large number are bound to stick. The humor is fairly consistent but surprisingly crass, skirting an R rating with consistent use of sex, drugs, and the Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say On Television. In its quest to be edgy, however, the film way overreaches with Mudflap and Skids, two jive-talkin' robots who are painfully unfunny and flat out racist (in case one's dangling gold tooth doesn't drive it home) voiced by voiced by Reno Wilson (Crank: High Voltage) and Tom Kenny (the voice of Spongebob and, as a cast member of Mr. Show with Bob and David, a comedian who has proven he's capable of far, far better).

Despite its shortcomings, it's hard to wholeheartedly recommend avoiding the film because, in its own weird way, it's kind of the ultimate big dumb summer action movie. The action is explosive and in-your-face and just keeps coming at you, every single battle upping the ante (with the battle between Optimus and an entire platoon of Decepticons in the middle of a forest being particularly high on the Badass Scale). The jokes are mostly pretty dang funny (and it was especially weird to note that, at the press screening, everyone laughed hard at at least a few jokes, but no one seemed to be laughing at the same ones). With the boring origin stuff out of the way, the main cast (both human and robot) are better fleshed out and more interesting than last time out and the plot, as labyrinthine as it is, is pretty easy to get sucked into, even as the film devolves from Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robot porn into a poor man's Da Vinci Code for a good half hour of its runtime. It's the cinematic equivalent of a giant tub of popcorn with extra butter: it's really greasy and you know it's terrible for you, but you kinda dig it anyway. | Jason Green