Transformers

Riding on the biggest ad campaign of the year to avoid another Island-sized disaster for Michael Bay (what, you thought the MTV Movie Award for “Best Summer Movie You Haven’t Seen Yet” was an actual award that a film actually won?), TRANSFORMERS provides quite a bit of food for thought: can a toy franchise be translated into a successful film? The true answer is yet to be determined, as TRANSFORMERS is too bogged down in all the typical Michael Bay action clichés to be much of anything else.

The slim story is another variation on the alien invasion/end of the world plot. This time, the fate of mankind rests between two warring sides of alien robots, the Autobots (led by the iconic Optimus Prime) and the Decepticons. The two sides were expelled from their wasteland of a planet and followed the mysterious Allspark to Earth, an object that holds the key in mankind’s potential destruction. The Decepticons use their disguises and human images to track down the Allspark while the Autobots struggle to stop them and protect the human race. And, yes, there are humans too; an average-Joe high schooler (Shia LaBeouf) discovers that his rusty car is in fact one of the Autobots, propelling him into the center of the robot battle.

All this plot should be just an excuse to get to big action scenes, but the overlong film unnecessarily attempts to develop itself for the first hour or so. At 144 minutes, this is no walk in the park, and the film could easily be trimmed at least a half hour. The first hour of the film basically serves as set-up, introducing and cultivating characters who aren’t that interesting in the first place. A few brief sequences in the Middle East provide some excitement during this time, but the film’s momentum sputters out when it turns its focus to LaBeouf’s character and the apple of his eye, a laughably stereotypical not-just-a-pretty-face supermodel/high schooler (an attractive but ultimately banal Megan Fox).

Much has been made about LaBeouf’s quick rise to stardom, and he is indeed a likeably unorthodox action hero and has grown a great deal from his awkward, usually unfunny sidekick turns in I, ROBOT and CONSTANTINE. His natural charisma and relatability are strong enough to rise above the material he’s given. The other performers don’t make nearly as much of an impression, giving the requisite action movie movements and nothing more: staring at things in awe, screaming in panic, running away and giving the occasional wisecrack. Only Julie White (in a small role as LaBoeuf’s mother) manages to imbue her scenes with genuine comedy, while John Turturro and Jon Voight come very close to embarrassing themselves.

The robots are serviceable, rendered with some very impressive CGI work. Where they fall flat is the obvious, awkward dialogue they are given. Yes, it’s nice to see that the robots have good working relationships and can joke around with each other, but the audience really wants to see them in action; something that is more or less denied until the final part of the film. Yet even when the film finally gets into the nonstop action it promises, it is stuck in one final battle sequence, which itself runs overlong and begins to tire.

Director Michael Bay seems unable to shake the clichés that harm his films so much; the bloated and overblown action isn’t enough, but he follows the recent pattern of shooting action scenes in tight, handheld shots, making it exceedingly difficult to grasp what exactly is going on. His characters have an annoying habit of always seeming to be covered in a glaze of sweat (no matter the situation), and by the time two characters stare lovingly at each other across a pile of debris, their hands reaching towards in each other in a slow-motion shot, you come to realize that he’s hit every cliché in the book at least three times. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the film didn’t feel so needlessly long.

Since it is the summer, some of these decisions should be forgivable. But the film takes far too long to really get going, never fully recovering and beginning to tire before its conclusion. The filmmakers clearly thought their subject more important than it actually is. TRANSFORMERS could have been a thoroughly enjoyable, exciting summer film, but Bay’s insistence on overblown and bloated films nearly makes it a chore to get through. The audience must wait 90 minutes for prolonged excitement it promises, and that’s really all the film has to offer.

*1/2