TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN – michael bay – 0.1 / 10

Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the worst movie ever made? Probably not (though it definitely deserves to be part of the conversation). It is, however, profoundly unsatisfying, deeply stupid and painfully unfunny. It’s as if, when the script was being written, the filmmakers asked themselves, ‘What would be the most obvious, most stereotypical thing to do in this situation?’ and then proceeded to do exactly that. The film makes no sense whatsoever, has no compelling action scenes (none that I could follow for more than a couple seconds at a time, anyway), no believable characters, nothing at all at stake and overstays its welcome by at least half an hour. In other words, Michael Bay’s latest is a complete and total failure on every level.

Leaving aside the larger story (which is both incomprehensible and impenetrable), the moment to moment action has no continuity or logic. Why, for instance, are the Autobots all scratched up and dented when in robot mode but look like they just rolled off the showroom floor when in car mode? Why are the Decepticons suddenly able to turn into organic objects? Why does their breath fog when they speak, even in outer space? Why do Sam and Mikaela insist on running everywhere while holding hands? Why does Bay constantly cut away from the action for terribly unfunny jokes like two dogs humping each other? Or, for that matter, why would Wheelie, the tiny Decepticon Mikaela is keeping as a pet, try to hump her leg? Do Transformers have sex?

About halfway through the film, Mikaela (Megan Fox, all pouty lips and sultry stares in a desperate attempt to earn a spot in the masturbation fantasies of thirteen-year-olds everywhere), Sam (Shia LaBeouf, doing the best he can and still failing miserably) and Simmons (John Turturro, somehow slumming it even more than last time) travel to the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC to awaken an ancient Transformer who can read the alien language Sam’s been seeing in his head. As soon as they revive said Transformer, he shambles off through a wall and out into some kind of airplane graveyard in the middle of the desert. Somehow, in the world of Revenge of the Fallen, Washington DC is located in the desert and surrounded by mountains.

Then, moments later, without informing the audience as to what’s happening or why, this ancient Transformer (who walks with a cane and generally acts like a geriatric British aristocrat) teleports our heroes to the Egyptian desert. It’s as if the story needed them to be in Egypt at that moment so all of a sudden, Transformers can teleport. You’d think that would be the sort of thing that would’ve come in handy at least a couple times in the past, but apparently not.

Once everyone gets to Egypt there’s a lot of nonsense about ancient riddles and a thing called, for reasons surpassing all understanding, The Matrix of Leadership, before the heroes set off for the ancient pyramids. When they arrive at a security checkpoint, Simmons convinces the guard that Sam, Mikaela and their moronic sidekick Leo are his family and the guard lets them through. No explanation, however, is offered as to how the two cars behind them, Autobots in car mode and seemingly driving themselves, manage to make it through as well.

Then, of course, comes the (anti-) climactic battle between Optimus Prime and The Fallen. In theory I suppose the idea of an ancient, supremely evil, father of the Decepticons sounds like an okay idea. But in execution The Fallen turns out to be the biggest pussy ever to threaten world domination. For most of the film, he remains safely ensconced in his deep space hideout until he thinks Optimus Prime is dead (because, for some reason, only a Prime can defeat The Fallen). When he does finally make it to earth, he stays out of the fighting until right at the very end whereupon a resurrected Optimus Prime kicks his ass in about thirty seconds flat. Like I said, he’s a pussy.

And about that whole Optimus resurrection thing. Can anyone in the audience, even the twelve-year-olds for whom this film is clearly made, possibly think that Optimus is really dead? Or, for that matter, can anyone really think that Sam wasn’t going to make it through? An awful lot of time is wasted as various characters scream and cry and generally act like idiots before both Sam and Optimus come back to life.

But more than just being incomprehensibly stupid, Revenge of the Fallen goes out of its way to be racist, stereotypical and tone deaf besides. The Autobot twins, who, along with Bumblebee (still unable to speak for no apparent reason), accompany Sam for most of the film, are such ridiculous caricatures of black ghetto youths that the only way to accurately describe their shtick is as a minstrel show. One of them has a gold tooth. Neither knows how to or has much interest in reading. And both talk as if they’re racist cartoon versions of an 80’s rapper, despite the fact that a white guy is giving one of them voice. It’s so overtly racist that the screenwriters were forced to issue an apology two days after the film was released.

But the racism doesn’t stop there. John Turturro’s Simmons, now working in a supposedly hilarious Jewish deli in Brooklyn, employs a black man as a butcher. Though this character is only given two lines, he’s such an outrageous mockery that it makes you wonder if Michael Bay might not actively hate black people. The only other black character of note in the film is Tyrese Gibson’s Sergeant Epps. And every time Epps opens his mouth, some sort of ebonics nonsense comes out. Admittedly, that’s pretty much all Tyrese does as an actor, but if you hire him, you know what you’re getting and Bay has to take some of the blame for hiring him in the first place.

As if all that weren’t enough, there are a couple weird references to President Obama being somehow timid and cowardly. Though only seen for a brief flicker on a television screen, Obama’s presence is implicitly represented by the douchebag national security agent who works under his authority. First this idiot tells the Decepticons everything they need to know (by pointlessly recapping the first film while their spy satellite is listening in) before proceeding to be a general pain in the ass and point of ridicule until the heroic commandoes toss him out the back of their airplane. Further, when the world is made aware of the Decepticon threat, there’s a quick cutaway of a reporter saying that the President is being flown to a secure location far from the danger in Egypt. The implication being that if Obama were a real leader, he’d fly into danger right beside our heroes instead of running away and hiding (never mind that he still has a government to run and that getting personally involved in an international crisis would do a lot more harm than good).

On top of all this incomprehensible racism, painfully tortured storytelling logic and idiotic character development, the audience is also subjected to Michael Bay’s usual bag of juvenile filmmaking tricks. There are too many shots of lights shining into the camera to count, multiple conversations where the camera spins around the actors in a misguided attempt at giving the lifeless dialogue a bit of energy, numerous slow motion hero shots and the inexplicable fetishization of military hardware that does little or no damage to the Decepticons.

There’s so much wrong with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen that it could serve as a treatise on how not to make a movie. Given the amount of time and money spent of this monstrosity, it’s actually somewhat amazing how bad it is. Maybe, in some kind of perverse way, the film deserves some respect for being so profoundly awful. You can be mediocre by accident, but to be this terrible you have to actively aim for the bottom. I guess, then, that congratulations are in order.