Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, John Turturro, Ramon Rodriguez
Director: Michael Bay
Category: IIB
Robots on a rampage in non-American lands: breaking things, delivering Dirty Harry-like send-off lines and talking dirty. A scantily-clad Megan Fox draped over a motorcycle. Add a few crass jokes and visual gags about foul-mouthed suburban parents and sex-crazed canines, for example, and you have an idea of what the first 20 minutes of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen looks like. In fact, that pretty much sums up a film so bombastic that it'll alienate all but the most loyal aficionados of morphing androids and Fox's physique.
And there's nothing ambivalent about which demographic Michael Bay is trying to please here: rather than widening the appeal of the Transformers franchise - which is what one would expect a sequel to do - Bay seems intent on fulfilling the cravings of hormonal teenage males, who'll most probably whoop and holler as the Autobots and the Decepticons slug it out for a device that can switch off the sun, decimate humanity and preclude a Transformers 3 sequel.
It's perhaps hardly coincidental that Sam, the world-saving teenage hero played by Shia LaBeouf, is rarely addressed by his full name - for his surname, Witwicky, would certainly jar with what's happening on screen, given how, for all Bay's attempts to inject the proceedings with crude humour, Revenge of the Fallen is completely devoid of wit. The preference for brawn over brain is perhaps epitomised by the way Sam, the human ally of the Autobots, sees his new life as a university freshman falling apart after just two days when the Decepticons - fronted by one masquerading as a sexually aggressive young woman (Isabel Lucas) - arrive on campus and destroy everything in view to get the young man to reveal some runes that are key to world domination. Or something.
