The little-boy fantasy of cars coming to life and turning into giant talking robots from outer space plummets straight into the high-tech junkyard in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It's so loud and relentless you feel you're in the center of a trash compactor. Although the movie goes all over the world to tell a rudimentary tale of good humans and good robots, or Autobots, uniting against the bad robots, or Decepticons, its frenetic and often pointless action induces a weird claustrophobia.
The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metal end up suffocating the senses. For slightly older boys, the film showcases Megan Fox as Mikaela, the grease-monkey beauty who loves the Autobots' best friend, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). On the DVD of the first Transformers movie, Fox says the director, Michael Bay, required two things: the ability to run and a stomach photogenic enough for low-slung jeans and "belly shirts." In this film, Bay moves his focus north. Fox often gallops in slow motion straight at the camera, in a pink top that displays her nubile glory.
The gag behind her character is that underneath her come-and-get-it looks, she's a good-hearted, one-man gal. When she performs a wriggling semi-strip, it reveals a wedding mini-dress she has bought to impress her beau.
Aside from its leering and its sophomoric sex jokes, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is as pre-pubescent as it is primordial. The series taps into infantile fantasies of smashing things up without really damaging them. Sam's yellow-and-black Autobot, Bumblebee, who doubles as his Chevy Camaro, is a good-hearted metal behemoth. But when he goes into action against invading Decepticons, he can't help tearing up the house and yard. Sam's sit-commy, bogus-blustery dad, Ron (Kevin Dunn), tells his equally sit-commy, blubbering wife, Judy (Julie White), not to overreact, because insurance and the government will pay for repair work and maybe even for an upgrade.
Underneath the juvenilia is not so much a story as a premise. The Decepticons came to Earth many millennia ago. A prologue set in Egypt, 17,000 B.C., re-creates the old joke, "What's the gunk between King Kong's toes? Slow natives" - with Decepticons instead of Kong.
