Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Director: Michael Bay
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 1.5
Action figure-based cash cow manages to be dumber (and longer!) than its predecessor - no small feat - as giant ass good machines continue to fight against giant ass bad machines for control of us worthless peons. It's a(nother) good example of what the late, great David Foster Wallace called "F/X Porn," and on a small screen it's cramped and busy: if the swirling camera got any closer to the images of gears whirring and mechanical bits morphing into different shapes this movie could, in skilled hands, be picked apart, slowed down and turned into a kind of avant-garde museum piece (hello, Chris Cunningham). Shia LaBeouf brings the right attitude to it - he's genuinely having fun - as does John Turturro, but they're secondary attractions to the displaced debris, inappropriate 'minstrel' bots, (already) outdated slang and product placements. It's also, conveniently, a thinly veiled advertisement for the U.S. Military.
