Without the fun of the original, these machines are running on empty, writes DONALD CLARKE
TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
Directed by Michael Bay
Starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Bigson, John Turturro, Peter Cullen
12A, gen release, 147min
IT IS ONLY right that I confess to having enjoyed the first film in this already monumentally tiresome franchise. Written by the same team that later brought us the Star Trekmovie, Transformers– robots in disguise! – offered us quite a few decent Spielbergian gags about suburbia before descending into the usual morass of digitally generated, barely coherent inter-robot mayhem.
Have the Transformers outstayed their welcome? Like negative equity. Like Big Brother. Like leprosy.
Clocking in at an aching two- and-a-half hours, the pompously titled Transformers: Revenge of the Fallenabandons the modest wit of the first film for a relentless assault on those parts of the brain that register noise, volume and inanity. Even Donald Rumsfeld would have trouble euphemising this as anything other than cruel and unusual punishment.
Beginning several thousand years before the birth of Christ and apparently playing out in real time, the film supposes that the Decepticons (bad transforming robots) and the Autobots (good transforming robots) had some role in the achievements of ancient civilisation. Back in the present day, Shia LaBeouf, sometime vanquisher of the Decepticons, is preparing to say goodbye to his girlfriend (Megan Fox) and his talking car as he heads off to college.
LaBeouf remains passably charming. Ms Fox, clearly an actor of no small ambition, has moved from leaning semi-nakedly over cars to leaning semi-nakedly over motorbikes and has somehow made her lips swell noticeably.
While Shia is packing away his stuff, he uncovers a shard of magic material that melts through the floor and turns all the kitchen appliances into savage beasties. It seems that the item is one part of a relic that will help enable a weary robot named The Fallen – who has, I think, been orbiting Saturn for millennia – to return to Earth and use the pyramids to annihilate the sun. Do I have this right?
Never mind all that guff. All you need to know is that, a few clumsily comic moments aside, Transformers 2consists of nothing but explosions, fights and, most peculiarly, dubious right-wing propaganda. This may be paranoia on my part, but, when the milquetoast from Washington invites disaster by ordering the soldiers to stand down their war while they attempt to negotiate with the Decepticons, I detect a non-too-subtle dig at the Obama administration and its supposed antipathy to the war on terror. Michael Bay, the film's notoriously unrestrained director, has said little about politics, but neither Pearl Harbornor Bad Boysstrike me as particularly liberal entertainments.
Anyway, none of this would matter if the action sequences were a little more engaging. It would, at least, be bearable if one knew where one was supposed to be looking and what it is one was supposed to be looking at.
Sadly, the over-reliance on computer graphics and the unnecessarily complicated robots – every corner has another corner – make the fight scenes almost impossible to follow. As the film progresses, it begins to take on the quality of an avant-garde experiment in which computers fires pixels at one another while generating random snatches of dialogue composed entirely of imperatives.
“Get down!” “Watch Out!” “Cover me! “Destroy Michael Bay!” Now that I think of it, the last line is entirely my own.
