Review

Review Date: 28-June-09
Spoiler Rating: Low
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

In second grade I had a friend named Michael Troop. All I remember about him is that he had dark hair and a name indicative of his favorite pastime. During breaks from the multiplication tables he and I would play "war," which consisted of drawing elaborate battle scenes on a piece of paper. Half the fun for me was watching Michael's excitement grow. He would start with one scrawly tank and a couple of stick figures and then, narrating with increasing volume, would add things like "and a helicopter arrives with turbo guns and these guys over here pull out the super grenades and suddenly these guys realize this pile of rocks is really a bunker hiding 600 special forces. With flame throwers. No, wait, rocket launchers! Pow! Pow! Pow! POW!"

The second Transformers movie reminds me a lot of Michael Troop. Director Michael Bay exhibits the same sort of excitement, piling one loud, special-effects-laden scene upon another. Unfortunately, he does not restrict himself to playtime but keeps it up through reading and social studies and recess, even through the detention he gets for making strafing noises during show-and-tell. The movie drags on for two and a half hours, which is enough to exhaust anyone no longer on training wheels or susceptible to puerile pyrotechnics. More than with the first movie, I understood the boy's enthusiasm for the Transformers themselves, admiring the grace and power of their computer-generated, toy-inspired bodies. But heading into the last 45 minutes I just wanted the childishness to end.

Like its predecessor, Revenge of the Fallen follows an inconsequential plot about humans and alien robots fighting for the fate of Earth. Nominal star Shia LaBeouf, a veteran of featherweight roles, is becoming less appealing with each flick, and pinup Megan Fox emerges as an unwitting joke as all suckers do who are paraded for appearance alone. She is joined in the misfortune of embarrassed beauty by Ramon Rodriguez, a newcomer who looks like Caravaggio's wet dream. I first noticed his ripe lips and liquid eyes in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, where he shared screen time with John Turturro. He does so again here to form a team of buffoons who provide comic relief amid the mayhem of flying metal and the posturing of men in camouflage. Smash! Boom! POW! They go to the space museum and this cool airplane robot teleports them to Egypt and then a commando sends up a flare but the machine-eating Decepticon has already climbed the Great Pyramid and that's when the naval destroyer arrives! Yes, Michael, very interesting. Now leave me in peace and go clean your room.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.