Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay wants Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen to give us more machines, more combat and fewer opportunities to catch our breath. That is a reasonable enough ambition for a robot sequel, provided we can follow the fighting and care who comes out of it. We cannot do either often enough here. This is a poor action film with some remarkable effects, stretched to 150 minutes by a story that manages to be thin and difficult to follow.

Those effects deserve their due. The machines have a convincing physical presence, and the amount of moving machinery can briefly hold our attention without help from the script. Ben Seresin’s cinematography is less successful at making the combat readable: too often, the image contains more metal than we can usefully sort into opponents. Nigel Phelps’s production design fares little better, since there is scant pleasure in the surroundings when following the combat takes this much effort. The effects remain the main attraction.

The editing by Joel Negron, Tom Muldoon, Roger Barton and Paul Rubell struggles to make the chases feel urgent. A chase can be busy and still seem to have gone on for ages, especially when the next bout of fighting offers much the same experience. We were bored by the repeated collisions of machinery, then irritated that so much skilled work was making so little difference. The cuts keep demanding a fresh response to familiar destruction. Too little changes between one fight and the next.

Alex Kurtzman, Ehren Kruger and Roberto Orci supply a screenplay whose complications do little to give the action a persuasive purpose. Complication would be welcome if it made the choices more interesting. Instead, the film asks us to keep track of information while giving us little reason to care about it. Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky and Megan Fox’s Mikaela Banes struggle to become people whose company we might want between battles. The script gives them too little that feels particular or worth listening to.

The comedy makes the waiting harder. John Turturro, playing Simmons, finds some laughs through the commotion, and his contribution is a useful reminder that this need not have been such a joyless business. Elsewhere, the crude slapstick and racial caricatures substitute easy recognition for an actual joke. Repeating them does not help. The treatment of Megan Fox is similarly wearying, with the camera more interested in looking her over than the screenplay is in giving her something to play.

Steve Jablonsky’s score adds to the insistence that all this should feel momentous. It gives the spectacle weight, but offers little relief in a film with so little quiet. An action adventure can be ridiculous and still be exciting; it needs a clear immediate problem and some variation in how it approaches it. Here, solemnity, vulgarity and fighting are piled together until even the potentially enjoyable excess begins to feel routine. The noise makes the length harder to forgive.

There are flashes of invention in the action, enough to explain why a devoted admirer of these machines might persevere. We would not dismiss the effort that makes them look so convincing, or insist that a robot fight should justify itself with a lecture. We do expect to know why one fight matters more than another. Those coming for mechanical spectacle may find enough to occupy them; anyone hoping for a lively evening should make another choice.