As the first movie I gave an F to, Transformers holds a special place in my heart.
"Heart" might be the wrong piece of anatomy, actually. It's probably in one of those organs that you don't really know what they do and they're filled with a vile liquid that should never be exposed to the light of day. Because it was awful. Handing down a harsh, harsh judgment upon it, however, was quite the opposite.
And you know what? I learned a little bit about myself, too -- that I should never be a teacher, because those kids would never come home with anything higher than a D-. The laughter that would provide me would need to be very good medicine indeed to cope with the beatings I'd catch from parents of 17-year-old third graders repeating my pottery class for the ninth time. Despite the undeniable pleasure that comes from judging the hell out of something, and the massive chance I'd get to do so again with my little F's sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I have to admit it was a long drive to the theater that day.
Two years after their defeat, the Decepticons are on the run and dwindling in number. Their only hope lies in stealing a shard of the All-Spark -- the artifact that grants life to TransFormers -- and resurrecting their dead leader, Megatron.
Shia LaBeouf, meanwhile, is heading off to college, where he's experiencing strange visions of symbols. Unknown to him, these are the keys Megatron needs to unleash his ancient master, bring the Decepticons to dominance and wreck up the entire world.
And wreck up they do. Unfortunately, it's surprisingly hard to tell who is whaling hell out of who when the TransFormer designs are this cluttered, awkward, and uniconic. The Decepticons are so spiky and chunky their fights with the AutoBots are akin to a silverware drawer doing battle with a used car lot.
This is trouble, because ferocious action scenes are really all Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has going for it. It's certainly not getting anywhere with its confused, subplot-heavy story or its deranged sense of humor, a frantic, hectic, screeching joke-delivery system that's far more puzzling than it is funny. For instance, director Michael Bay appears to believe making his robots behave like obvious ethnic stereotypes is endlessly hilarious.
Who can blame him! You know why Scotland's never accomplished anything? Because everyone there is too busy laughing at their own accents to get anything done. Italian-Americans get some love, too -- and at this point it's a fair question to ask if a movie can be racist when it dumps on all races equally -- yet I can't help wondering, if only for a moment, if there's something wrong with the way the "black" Transformers are essentially a jive-talking 21st century minstrel show with giant gold teeth who can't read.
The very act of describing that has made me feel insane, which may explain why, for all its miscalculations, frivolous idiocy (the scene that really drove this home for me: the one where the giant pseudo-Scottish robot-monster craps out a parachute), and general no-goodness, Revenge of the Fallen couldn't drive me to the same heights of hatred the first one did.
That could be a simple case of the most potent force in the universe -- diminished expectations. When you expect suck, even concentrated doses of suckage don't suck so bad. This is why I tell all my Internet girlfriends I weigh 1,200 pounds. When they find out I'm a svelte 1,165, I'm gold.
But setting the bar so low for itself doesn't explain it all. Except for the moronic ethnic stuff, Revenge of the Fallen isn't so gratingly obnoxious or cynically targeted to the x-treme sensibility as its predecessor. With this franchise, "just kinda bad" is a big step up from "abominable trainwreck."
Grade: C-