Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen

There are certain things you know you're going to see when you watch a Michael Bay movie: slow motion running, sweaty close-ups, gargantuan plot-holes, thundering stupidity, insultingly broad stereotypes, painfully unfunny comic relief, and incoherent action scenes. Pretty much all of those are on glorious display in Transformers 2: The Something of the Something, with one surprising exception. Michael Bay has reigned for years as the worst director of action in Hollywood. His twin obsession with close-ups and rapid cuts typically results in migraine inducing abstractions. The first Transformers is a perfect example of Bay's raging deficiencies as a director, exacerbated by the inherent difficulty of staging fight scenes between nearly-identical piles of CGI scrap metal. Which makes it even more puzzling that the action scenes in Transformers 2 show an unprecedented directorial competence. Instead of filling the screen with inscrutable, spark-shooting chunks of steel, Bay pulls his camera back far enough to see the whole robot while its shooting its laser gun or punching another robot in its metal face. In particular, Bay stages a forest battle between Autobot leader Optimus Prime and a horde of Decepticons with a near-Kubrickian sense of distance and perspective. This newfound restraint reveals an eternal truth that's easy to forget when Bay straps his camera to the head of a marmot: giant robot battles are inherently awesome.

Or course, awesome robot battles take up less than a hour of Transformers 2's interminable two and a half hour running time, which means that most of the time you're not watching two robots punch each other. Instead, the audience is punished with endless scenes of Shia Labeouf sweating all over alleged actress and suspected sentient blow-up doll Megan Fox, inept comedic business staring LaBeouf's oafish parents and/or ebonics-spouting robots, and nonsensical expository dialogue. It's all about what you'd expect from a movie that prominently features Hasbro in the opening credits. The humans and the robots behave with similar complexity and depth of emotion, giving ample opportunity for bathroom and snack breaks. Connoisseurs of bad dialogue and juvenile pandering should stay glued to their seats, though.

While most of Transformers 2 is garden-variety summer dreck, the last half hour reaches ecstatic peaks of illogic, not to mention slow motion running and shouting. All of the half-baked mythology indifferently spewed forth during the first two hours becomes relevant, culminating in a visit to a magical land that could best be described as robot heaven. The very concept of robot heaven is so left-field nuts, not to mention borderline sacrilegious, that it almost redeems the indifferent plotting and perfunctory emotional beats. Coming on the heels for some genuinely rousing robot-on-robot action, it helps raise Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen above the run of awful Michael Bay movies into its own category of awfulness.