DVD Review – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Somewhere, in between explosions, John Turturro is in the middle of a discussion with robot Jetfire (who happened to be the best Christmas present I ever received). Trying to get to the nuts and bolts of Michael Bay’s epic toy story Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Turturro lets this loose:

Let’s not get episodic, okay, old-timer? Beginning, middle, end. Facts, details. Condense: Plot. Tell it!

Leave it to Michael Bay and his erstwhile writers to laugh at themselves in the middle of their big alien robot blowup. Episodic? We got any episode you want – action, destruction, After School Special puppy-dog love, robot testicle humor – don’t forget Amos and Andy gone hip-hop with laser rifles. Just don’t look for it to gel into anything coherent, it flashes by in the bat of an eye. Beginning, middle, end? It’s all interchangeable. Plot? Barely any, and what’s there is just to move you from one blow up to another.

Turturro’s speech kicks us off to the big climax, which was sorely needed, but let’s give Bay credit for self-awareness. He knows what his movies are about and he doesn’t care. Michael Bay would wipe his ass with an Oscar, chuck it to some kid on a sidewalk then go off planning his next way of blowing something up. If your inner 14-year-old became a director, it would be Michael Bay.

And with that, the director is given an unlimited budget to do what he does best. Mixing and mashing fourth-grade humor with his action spectacle.

But the spectacle bogs. Bay’s transformers are quite the cinematic feat, but there’s too much there. Watch Up or any Pixar film, the detail is in spades but the look is simplistic – you can follow it without going into a diabetic coma or suffering a lack of oxygen flow to the brain. Optimus Prime and his cohorts are too complicated to follow across a wide screen full of flames, tits, ass, pot jokes and hot rod cars.

In case you didn’t know, Megan Fox is hot. She’s even hotter in a Michael Bay movie, where make-up covers the hideous tattoos and the director’s eye captures curves better than Russ Meyer. It’s no wonder she makes the robots horny, and she doesn’t seem to mind, which makes it all the better.

The usual government malfeasance is there, this time the target is Barack Obama. His deputy czar assistant to the jurisprudence invective’s secretary shows up and blames the heroic Autobots for all the planet’s troubles and the war with the Decepticons. Does any of this sound familiar, blaming those fighting the war for causing the war? The soldiers don’t buy it, they’ve shed blood and metal with the big guys. Push comes to shove, the cards are dealt and what’s the Obama cure for fixing everything? Handing the enemy what they want. Write it down: Michael Bay – political visionary.

And he knows how to please the military. The call to arms is given – orders be damned – and in come the B-2’s, the F-16s, the F-18s, the F-22s, M-1 Abrams, Humvees, C-5’s, C-130s, M4A1s, nonexistent battleship rail guns – hero mode on full – all the while a smile slowly creeps across the face of this writer. The robots? The bad ones are dealt with. No apologies needed. All done in what is the least pretentious movie you’ll ever see.

Acting? Who needs acting. The great character actor Kevin Dunn does his damnedest to try, and he does it well. For one moment, Dunn actually convinces you those robots are trying to kill him, something Shia LaBeouf doesn’t get across. It becomes a problem where the robots seem to be in a completely different film than the humans. Bad acting, or maybe bad humor getting in the way, who knows, but George Lucas’ corny humor (and not the good JohnFN corny) permeates. How do we reconcile the sun being extinguished with Sam’s mom eating campus brownies? Give Bay credit for knowing you probably won’t care or even try or remember past the next bite of popcorn.

The blockbuster-ness is all fine and dandy, but what about the characters? Optimus Prime was John Wayne to a whole generation that grew up during the 1980s, it’s a shame his story isn’t being told. The cartoon was what it was, a cheap attempt to sell and market toys, but these characters had stories to tell and personalities to identify with, the fact they turned into jets or Lamborghini’s made it all the better. Maybe that Transformers movie will be made one day, but now we’ll try to keep up with Michael Bay’s leering and loud lens.

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