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, a movie that manages to mangle a whole slew of sure-fire fantasies. For slightly younger boys, the Transformers series taps into the infantile wish fulfillment of smashing things up without really damaging them. And for slightly older boys, the films showcase Megan Fox as Mikaela Banes, the grease-monkey beauty who loves our teenage hero, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf).
But Michael Bay's movie is 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 movie tries to build to an Armageddon- (and Armageddon-) scale battle between Decepticons and Autobots and human warriors (i.e., American soldiers), and between Optimus Prime and a new Decepticon supreme leader, The Fallen.
Nothing, though, can build in a Michael Bay film, because this director dials up everything to the same intensity. He'd have been a great techie for Spinal Tap. Even the comic relief becomes as high-pitched and hard-sell as the action. You know the stakes are life or death for the planet because the characters tell you so, and because the stakes always are mortal and global in this kind of movie. But the filmmakers don't keep their eye on the ball or on the Cube, either. (The Cube is the font of life for Autobots and Decepticons.) They stuff the film with shtick - in fact, the whole movie is built with tons of shtick and gallons of sap. In this film's attempt at symmetry, Sam sees his mother bawl when he goes off to college only to learn that his father is the one who can't "let go"; Mikaela tries to squeeze an "I love you" out of her man only to end up telling him first.
A prop critical to the final action is a key called "the Matrix of leadership." It's an unfortunate allusion, since Revenge of the Fallen is as poor as the Matrix sequels or the last two Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The whirl, bang and general bother of crashing gears and gnashing metals end up suffocating the senses.
Rated PG-13 for violence, language and sexual material. Time 137 minutes.
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