Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

Director Michael Bay is never going to win an award for subtlety, but his take on absurd, all action-films has won him legions of fans and bucket-loads of cash. After the success of the first Transformers movie a sequel was inevitable, and he does what he can be relied on to do – basically stick exactly to the formula of the first movie, only make it louder, dumber and much, much longer. Diminishing returns have set in pretty fast here, but for all that, somehow Revenge of the Fallen is still more fun than Terminator: Salvation.

Bay has also managed to reassemble his cast – no Christian Bale stand-ins here – so Shia LeBeouf is again Sam Witwicky, trying to lead a normal life and off to college, but when he touches the remaining fragment of the Cube it fills his head with all sorts of weird symbols. Could these hold the key to a secret location where a potentially deadly weapon is located? Well, duh. Those nasty Decepticons are planning to wipe out the human race, and Sam, plus girlfriend Megan Fox and symbols expert John Turturro, have, ooh, about 24 hours to save the earth. It all climaxes in Egypt, where the pyramids are hiding the weapon and the whole US Navy does battle with the enormous robots.

The script-writing process was interrupted by last year’s Writer’s Strike, but to be honest it probably wouldn’t make much difference – the point here is all about the action sequences, which are pretty much identical to the first film. Giant robots crashing into each other gets wearisome after a while, and sometimes even the much-vaunted special effects don’t work – the transformers change too quickly for the human eye to pick up what is going on, and sometimes it’s confusing.

In its favour there are certainly more jokes than the first film – a sequence with Sam attending his first physics class and having the heebee-geebees is very funny, and his mum (Julie White) has some witty moments. LeBeouf himself holds things together with some charm, although he is yet to really stretch himself, while Megan Fox restricts herself to pouting.

There are references to Gremlins and Wall-E, but that simply serves as a reminder that those films were warmer and funnier than this one. As sequels go, it just about justifies its existence and if you liked the first, you’ll probably like this, but please, not another one.

Overall verdict: An inevitable sequel that simply mirrors the first film. Way too long for what it is.

Reviewer: Mike Martin