1 out of 5

Directed by: Michael Bay

Coming to it many years after the fact, the first Transformers was not a surprising view, given its legacy – it was exactly the big and loud and Baysian stereotype it solidified – but it was undeniably effective at being exactly what it intended to be, and that youthful enthusiasm made it, at the very least, properly distracting.

Whatever positives regarding a Michael Bay movie stereotype can be drawn from that are flip-flopped in the sequel: assume every criticism of vacuousness, sexism, puerility, lack of scene composition, swirly cameraness, excessive explosions and vague racism and… there you go.

On some level, this is the same movie, of course, but whatever caution / restraint was added before in bringing a toy franchise semi-plausibly to screen is gone, here, with retroactive blame for its poor reception placed on the writer’s strike at the time, and rushed production woes. …Although, y’know, it still made billions.

Anyway, Transformers human proxy Sam (Shia LeBeouf) is headed off to college, planning to maintain a long distance relationship with girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), while the bots are now engaged fully with secret government ops as part of NEST (Non-biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty; wowow), allowing first movie vets Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson to have what are, essentially, cameos.

The Decepticons are still attacking the planet, now being guided by secret space baddie “The Fallen” (voiced by Tony Todd), who sends his minions out to resurrect Megatron, and, I dunno, also fetch some new Earth-destroying MacGuffin.

Sam runs afoul of a shard from the first movie’s MacGuffin which makes him relevant again (justifying the human actors’ presence was a struggle in Transformers, and remains so here), and, again, while this is  just swapping in new elements on the previous plot, nothing about that guarantees TF 2 will be any worse per se, except that it was tenuous ground before, fully unsettled by the sequel’s indulgences.

More of everything: nearly every sequence is either the camera swirling 360 for no real reason, or choppily edited sequences of running and explosions and slo-mo bot jumping, and lots of shouting out names, passionately, when that person almost dies. Male characters and non-sexualized females are exclusively two flavors: stoic line delivery of serious military bluster types, or fast-talking quirks who make cringe jokes and use slapped together tech talk; sexualized female characters are exclusively Megan Fox.

I do think there was an initial attempt to refocus on the humans, which is wise, but this gets quickly lost behind escalating nonsense, which really reads / watches like a team trying hard to figure out why any of this makes sense, and adding more and more details to do so, then giving up.

Which is ultimately the easiest summation of the film, adding more and more until all the ‘bots and bullets are flying, all of the explosions are happening, and then we shoulder shrug for about another two hours minutes until the credits.

As a small positive, most of the effects probably look cool, and Bay / his effects team again had a good sense of using blocking to combos of physical / digital to add some impact to things. At the same time, the scope and screentime are bumped up, leading to some more rushed moments, and a general feeling that all of this is just less special than it may initially have been.