Transformers: Insert Banal, Parodical Subtitle

So this weekend I decided to cruise down to Maryland to hang out with my middle/high school friend Andy. It was my second trek down there, and I have to say I do very much enjoy the drive. The Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, the gorgeous rural Maryland driving, all of it. But this weekend was not without its mishaps.

Namely one named Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

I shouldn't really be surprised, though. I specifically was visiting the area to see the movie with Andy, and this certainly continued the streak I have of going to awful films with friends of mine. Anyway, we were quite surprised when the film was sold out for the 10:30pm Friday showing, figuring that a smallish town like Lexington Park would have trouble supporting such a showing. We were quite incorrect, so we ended up seeing it the next day at a matinee.

Without further ado, it was a waste. My time is essentially worthless for the most part, so I will only very rarely complain about it being wasted, but this two-and-a-half hour abomination falls squarely into that category. Really, the action was about the same as the first Transformers film, lots of tumbling metal. It was still fairly difficult to distinguish between the robots when they were punching and rolling about - something I had a fair amount of difficulty with in the first movie, but far more in this one.

Anyway, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to find good points about the film, but I'll say that the computer graphics work was fantastic. A forest battle involving Optimus Prime was fantastically animated and well done, in addition to being a little more comprehensible than the other fights. A little nostalgia was brought about thanks to the arguments between Starscream and Megatron so characteristic of the old cartoons. And yeah, that's pretty much all I enjoyed about the movie.

It's easier to express my hatred of this film's weaker points in bullet format, since there's just too many to list in paragraph format.

• The length. At about 140 minutes, the film dragged on far too long. The plot was quite slow and the story extremely bloated; they could have easily cut it down to a hundred minutes and been fine.
• Speaking of the plot, it was pulling in several different directions for the first hour and a half of the film. Subplots that didn't go much of anywhere included the relationship troubles of the two main characters and the power squabbling between military high-ups. They wasted a lot of time setting these up, and really they weren't resolved in any meaningful or satisfactory way. It just seemed so confused.
  
• The sound in any scene that wasn't gigantic robots punching each other was mixed terribly. Effect sounds were extremely loud compared to dialogue to the point where some scenes obscured the vocals to the point of being unable to follow them.
• The comic relief made me want to shoot myself in the face. Yes, it's a kids' movie, but the sheer amount of characters thrown in simply for comedy was mind-boggling - they easily outnumbered the "serious" characters. Sam's clueless and stereotypical parents were the most guilty of this, especially the mind-bogglingly stupid incident with the mother and pot brownies. John Tuturro brought me to a state somewhere between sobbing for what his career used to be and shaking my head at how the mighty fall. Oh, and of course, the racist characters that somehow made it to the final cut made me wince.
  
• There was never a point where I felt much empathy or even sympathy for the characters. There was never really any sense of real danger, but this may be because of the type of film Transformers II is. I knew that in the end everything would be hunky-dory.

Really, I have to agree with a friend of mine who stated that one loses I.Q. points when seeing a film this poorly crafted. Skip it if you haven't already - at best, it's a movie that you put on when you're writing a report or doing homework and occasionally glance up to see a robot catch an uppercut on the chin.