There’s a small detail in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that cuts to the heart of Michael Bay’s tact. Teen hero Sam (Shia
LaBeouf) sits in his university astronomy class, where somehow every
enrolled female student looks like a Maxim model. To appreciate
some of Bay’s movies, one must learn to accept that his interests
probably haven’t developed much since seventh grade. Transformers
2, like the first one in the series, and Armageddon, takes
the passions of an excitement-starved, emotionally stunted boy, and
turns them into gigantic postcard iconography.
This isn’t to say that Transformers 2 is good, exactly. At
two-and-a-half hours long, it feels like five. And what little story
there is has barely any discipline or structure whatsoever. But as a
summer behemoth, it really knows its place. Bay’s beer- and
car-commercial visuals were offensive in Pearl Harbor. In
Transformers 2, they serve his grand Americana: the military,
teen lust, outer space, war, General Motors. It’s less a movie than an
expert collage of hyper-polished summer blockbuster matter.
Scrapping the central auto-human love affair of the first film (the
equation of boys playing with toys with men and their war machines)
hurts the sequel. Bay’s macho worldview hasn’t the humanity to seek
real depth beyond his images. The last movie was about teenage Sam
breaking from his nerd shell by getting a cool car, dating beauty
Mikaela (Megan Fox) and winning a war. In short, he became the Michael
Bay ideal of a great American. This time, since Sam’s no longer an
underdog, there’s nowhere much to go. Only a couple scenes focus on his
inability to tell Mikaela he loves her. This should be the driving
personal conflict, but Revenge of the Fallen is too distracted
by noise to run with it. Bay makes up for it because his filmmaking is
more energized throughout—not just during the action scenes.
The first, and successful, half has an anything-goes sensibility.
This isn’t quite Crank 2, but it’s a proudly loony sequel. Sam
freaks out at a party, writing hieroglyphics out of icing. He’s later
seduced in his dorm by a “female” machine. When his mom eats pot
brownies and molests students on a campus visit, it’s a cheap Bayism.
You will recall a similarity to Homophobic Joke #44 in Bad Boys
2, which had Martin Lawrence hitting on his male boss while on
Ecstasy. So much of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen seems
gratuitous that it finally achieves a zany liberation.
It’s at about that point that Bay regresses into turbo-action
tedium. The robots duke it out against the Egyptian pyramids, and the
film’s zaniness slackens into a beautifully rendered but lumberingly
paced showdown of Hasbro toys. The state-of-the-art robot effects in
the first film were criticized for taking secondary status to human
characters. In TF2, they’re overused until they become too much
of a good thing. Spectacular, exhausting and brain-dead,
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a five-course meal made
of foods you probably shouldn’t eat.
For showtimes, see Movie Times, page 19. Fill up on
empty calories at palermo@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2009.
this is great