3 out of 5

Directed by: Michael Bay

I will do my best to not rewrite my own movie history, but: I always had my suspicions about Michael Bay that aligned with the overall negative bandwagon that formed somewhere after Armageddon. I know for sure that I really dug Bad Boys; a fledgling love for Martin Lawrence and Tea Leoni at the time I think had me interested, and ultimately I was more surprised than anything else over how much I enjoyed the movie, though we can factor in that it was right around when I was half-sneaking in R-rated movies / half-convincing my parents it was cool to let me rent them, and Bay’s style – already in-action in that first flick – kind of matched whatever action movie I always imagined whenever playing with my toys. (A fitting commentary on Bay in general, perhaps.)

But: I remember watching The Rock with my dad and getting a buzz in the back of my head that, like, this was pretty dumb. It had the vibes of Bad Boys, but seemed to power down even more on brain power in favor of visuals. And by the time of Armageddon – whew. I hadn’t even connected that this was all the same director, but as a Bruce Willis fan, going to see that flick on opening day, I almost walked out of the theater. This is after having ingested much of Bruce’s 90s flicks, which are by and large great or not bad, but have a fair amount of stinkers as well. …And yet I waited for big screen triumphs for Brucie with Armageddon? Woof.

When Transformers rolled around, I knew who Bay was. And I was not a fan. And it irked me that it seemed like the majority of filmgoers were actually part of that aforementioned negative bandwagon – the dude is a maker of pure eye candy – but didn’t seem to care? I ended up seeing bits and pieces of Transformers for various reasons but couldn’t commit to the full thing; that buzz in my head returned: this stuff looked pretty cool, but even in clips, it just felt empty.

A couple decades and like 90 films into this franchise later, and I’m finally ready to give it a go. I’m by no means a Bay fan at this point, but the industry has undeniably been influenced by his style in the intervening years – bouncing back and forth from CGI blockbusters to street-level John Wick flair and some attempt to meld the two – such that I’m less sensitive to whatever offenses I could’ve attributed to him; and / or I no longer have the energy for the hate. Either way: bring it on.

…Though my original take seemed to be correct: I don’t know if, to date, I’ve seen a movie as willfully vacuous as Transformers, and yet executed with a kind of dedicated to exactly that type of entertainment that somehow allows 2.5 hours to pass in a blink. While it was always going to be a tough sell to figure out how to turn a show about alien machines who disguise themselves as cars into a feasible film adults and kids can enjoy, we’ve had men in black and mutant turtles and mutant mutants and so, y’know, screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman just had to do enough to get us to the Transformers transforming sound-effect, and assuming the visuals could carry us from there – they did, and surprisingly, still do – we’d be good. But even with that low bar, Bay and his team seemed to sense that truly nothing needed to matter beyond well-timed spectacle, and so: nothing does.

After opening exposition about a war between dueling mech aliens, and an important thingamabob that crash-landed on Earth, Shia LaBeouf shows up as ne’er-do-well, unpopular high school kid Sam, and Megan Fox as all-the-boys-want-her-I-guess classmate Mikaela, and the former unknowingly stumbles across the thingamabob, then gets happenstanced into protecting said thingamabob with the latter thanks to a meetcute arranged by “Autobot” (good robots) Bumblebee (voiced by Mark Ryan), and then the duo go on the run from both the “Decepticons” (bad robots) and confused government agents led by John Turturro and Jon Voight, who are treating all bots – good or bad – as invaders. Elsewhere, Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson get to be sweaty and patriotic.

Please don’t stop to think about this. Don’t stop to think about any logistics; or the how / why of the Autobots quest for the thingamabob – the cube – and the random limitations of their abilities. How the various “plot threads” are not tied together and just arrive in the same space; how Bay knows to throw in slapstick sequences between gigantic robots and dunderhead parents that goes on for ten minutes to long but I’m sure slayed in theaters. Then again: you won’t have to stop to think about it, because the camera will keep swooping about, and another “I say it in a voice that lets you know I’m joking” line will be uttered, and then some ‘bot or ‘con will womp-womp-womp transform and you’ll just kind of be dazzled, and we’re on to the next scene. I am obviously being extremely flippant, but, damn, it’s a spell that stupidly works. LaBeouf and Fox honestly give really great performances for completely hollow characters, and the same is true for all the leads – this is cookie cutter, predictable stuff, but Bay cast well and got said cast to tune in. He also (with the help of a team) knew how to shoot around the effects, not wasting time trying to get humans to interact with the robots too much and letting the design team just go to town to make the transformations and hilarious anime fights distracting as heck. (And often not making a lick of sense.)

Some usual caveats about a complete disregard for geography apply, and part of the mind-numbing nature of this is never allowing or brains to kind of get settled in any one scene. A bit more directly critically, Bay’s over-dramatic style, and the sweaty, blue-tinted, overlit look he settled on with cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen tend to contrast with the PG-13 jokeyness of the film’s tone – a bit less grit and flash may’ve suited this, or pitching it without the teen tagalongs might’ve helped in that regard as well. But your brain has mostly turned off anyway, so…

And that is many more words than was probably needed about this. It is not a good film. It’s not even a “cool” film because, damn, it’s so empty.

It is successful in its goal as 100% distraction. I don’t even know if that’s a positive or negative.