Transformers
Transformers is another big, loud, stupid fireball from Michael Bay—now with bonus exposition! Never in my life did I think I would find myself pleading for more robots and less story in a movie. Congratulations, Mr. Bay, you have outdone yourself in the realm of explosive mediocrity, even for a movie based on a series of toys.
About an hour and ten minutes into this snooze fest, I turned to my wife and asked if she was as curious as I was as to when the first act of this monstrosity was coming to an end, and where the hell were all the damn robots? As the sputtering, long-winded plot unfolds we come to learn that a high school senior named Sam Witwicky is the grandson of an explorer who encountered an alien object in the arctic many years ago; and now warring races of living machines—Autobots and Decepticons—have arrived to do battle over it. I think you can figure out who the good and bad guys are on your own.
Sprinkled among all this gasbaggery are the usual collection of comic relief goof balls, including an absurdly silly John Turturro as a paranoid government agent. Megan Fox, today's it-girl, is certainly pleasant to look at, but her acting is about as stiff as Jon Voight's hair. The only person who escapes this fiasco unharmed, contrary to what you'll read about him across the blogosphere, is Shia LaBeouf. He has absolutely nothing to work with here and does a great job of making his character more three-dimensional than it was written.
Eventually the action really gets going, but by then I couldn't have cared less about the outcome. Sure, it all looked very cool on the giant IMAX screen, but I'd already been lulled into a deep sense of recycled gags and slow-motion explosions. I was so bored, I started picking apart the plot to entertain myself and thinking about how convenient it was that all the Autobots only convert into General Motors vehicles.
Nothing like a little product placement spotting to pass the time.