Something is seriously amiss when a movie as noisy and frenetic as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is so boring it puts you to sleep.
For 2 ½ hours, everything in “Fallen” assaults the audience at a furious meth-fueled pace, and the thing’s so loud you could fire up a chainsaw in the theater without anybody noticing.
But I’m not ashamed to admit it: I think even I might have caught a few ZZZZs near the end of Michael Bay’s latest. Not so much sleeping as resting from the onslaught. Every scene in this movie is like every other. You could snip out big chunks of the film without doing any damage to what passes for the narrative.
Think of it as epic emptiness.
The thin plot, ships teen hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) off to college (look for some fine comic work from Kevin Dunn and Julie White as his empty-nester parents). After his experiences with sentient machines from outer space in the first flick, Sam wants nothing more than to enjoy the simple pleasures of a university freshman.
Not so fast. An encounter with a shard of Transformer leaves his head filled with scientific data and arcane implants. Seems that Sam is now the repository of info about a long-hidden energy source sought both by the good-guy Autobots and the bad-guy Decepticons.
Meanwhile a special military unit made up of Autobots and humans (including Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson) is engaged in a worldwide effort to destroy the remaining Decepticons. Easier said than done, because the villains can disguise themselves as almost any sort of machine. In fact, this film introduces Decepticons no bigger than a housecat and others that can pass for human.
Sam teams up with the renegade former government agent Simmons (John Turturro), main squeeze Mikaela (Megan Fox) and his new college roomie (Ramon Rodriguez) and gets caught in a big metal-on-metal smackdown in an ancient temple in the shadow of Egypt’s pyramids. If you think the place was a ruin when the fight starts, just wait.
As a display of creative f/x, “Transformers” is impressive. The scenes of these beings transforming from trucks, cars and planes into humanoid robots are initially fascinating, with cogs whirling and metal plates clanking into position. Problem is, they never stop moving — the movie’s so busy there’s no place for the eye to rest.
A much bigger problem is the lack of characters. The 2007 original benefited from a genuine sense of discovery and LaBeouf’s boyishly appealing sense of wonder. But this time around, not even the huggable LaBeouf makes much of an impression — he’s been reduced to a buffoon. And Fox spends most of the movie looking … bored.
The Transformers don’t have characters — their dialogue runs from “Let’s roll!” to “You want a piece of me?” And when they do exhibit personalities — like a couple of goofy Autobots who talk like demented gangsters — the results are borderline racist.
In an effort to appeal both to original fans of the Transformers — now in their 30s — and their offspring, writers Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman dish both simplistic slapstick and off-color elements.
There’s liberal use of PG-13 language and some crude visual humor — like one tiny Decepticon that keeps trying to hump Fox’s leg (yes, really).
The action is rough enough that if it were among human characters rather than big metal giants this “Transformers” would easily have earned an R.
Good thing robots don’t bleed.
‘ ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'’ ★
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, John Turturro, Josh Duhamel
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, language, some crude and sexual material, and brief drug material
Running time: 2:30
