Year: 2009
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
The Autobots have made a deal with the U.S. government to hunt down any remaining Decepticons. Now, a new threat arises from an ancient Transformer known as The Fallen. He hopes to destroy Earth, and only Optimus Prime is left stop him.
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is directed by Michael Bay and is the second installment in the "Transformers" film franchise. Almost all of the original cast is back for this sequel, including Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, and many more.
There is a new threat looming from an ancient Decepticon known as The Fallen, who is obviously out for revenge. According to some rule somewhere, only a Prime can kill The Fallen, and wouldn't you know it, Optimus just happens to be the last one left! Of course, LaBeouf's Witwicky once again becomes a target of the Decepticons after he finds out he has a sliver of the AllSpark cube stuck to his shirt (apparently it's got awesome magnetic powers because it was there for over a year!). This sliver gives him crazy visions of an ancient Cybertron language.
The first "Transformers" movie was an action epic blockbuster summertime popcorn flick, which had some moments of comedy sprinkled throughout its very long runtime to lighten the mood. This entry goes the opposite route and has gone full-blown goofball. It attains levels of self-parody we didn't even think were possible. Twin Autobots are introduced in this installment, characters which have obviously been added for comedic purposes only. They positively are the dumb and dumber of the Transformer species. This movie also seems to have an overabundance of sex jokes. Some examples include a humanoid-looking female Decepticons that essentially tries to rape Sam, a miniature robot that, at one point, humps Megan Fox's leg, and Sam's dogs shown to be humping multiple times for no apparent reason. We're all for a little raunch, but only where it fits in the context of a story. Then again, the target audience of "Transformers" is 10-to-45-year-old males, so we guess it goes without saying?? Speaking of Megan Fox and raunch, her character has a moment where she is forced to land, unconscious, face first into Witwicky's roommate's crotch. There is even a joke about being under the scrotum of Devastator, dangly balls and all. *sigh* The dialogue is so bad and so overloaded with silly jokes, it will have you rolling your eyes every five seconds, and given the movie's length, that's like 1,800 times.
The acting wasn't particularly good in the first movie, but now, it's a full-on spectacle. This marks the point at which Shia LaBeouf began his slow descent into fidgety, spastic madness, and it even gets worked into the script here. We didn't think it was humanly possible for Megan Fox to get worse at acting between these two installments, but somehow, she did. John Turturro is utterly useless in this installment. Did anyone really need to see his ass hanging out of a jock strap? We don't think so, but Michael Bay sure as shit thought it was a necessary addition to the story! We mentioned Witwicky's new roommate, Leo (Ramon Rodriguez), up above, and wonder why he's even in this movie? He accompanies Sam and Mikaela on their adventure for no reason, serves no purpose, and is the most annoying character in the entire movie.
As far as the new robot additions go, we couldn't have been more disappointed in the design aesthetic of the Constructicons, especially when assembled like the aforementioned Devastator, who looks more like a giant dog in this incarnation. Michael Bay had an opportunity to create a truly epic battle between Devastator and the Autobots but wound up only pitting him against Tweedledee and Tweedledum. What a waste.
Another problem with this movie is that it is way, way too long. At one point, we thought everything was about to wrap up, only to discover it had over an hour of time left. Just because you can make a movie nearly 3 hours long, doesn't mean you should if you don't need to do so. The story doesn't really make much sense. It is loaded with one contrived plot device after another, and it just feels meandering with a lot of crap blowing up around it. The content of this story doesn't lend itself to a nearly 3-hour runtime and will almost assuredly lose the audience somewhere along the way.
"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" could be fun if it were given the MST3K treatment, but on its own, it is a damn travesty.
My Rating: 2.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 3/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.0/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 19%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!
Decepticon Nut Sack. Enough said.
ReplyDeleteRIGHT????? Alternative "enough said": dog humping.
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