Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/26/09
Two
years ago, I wrote quite a bit about Michael Bay's Transformers,
a movie of which I was aggressively of two minds. On the one hand,
it had a crude, silly desperation to be all things to all people, eating
insane amounts of screen time with dreadful (and dreadfully broad) comic
relief. But on the other, it was an amazing blockbuster feast of
sights and sounds, featuring action the likes of which I'd never seen before.
On balance, I liked the movie quite a bit, and even moreso once my brain
made a certain amount of peace with its' silly excesses. I don't
know why, but for some reason I assumed a sequel would build upon what
worked and set aside what didn't, but Transformers: Revenge of
the Fallen is actually a step backwards for the franchise. Emphasizing
allegedly crowd-pleasing nonsense like a new pair of blaxploitation robots
at the expense of the characters and themes that made the original great,
Revenge
gets by on that fact that it's still pretty damn amazing to watch these
giant robots slug it out. But if all involved could just stop telling
themselves “It's just Transformers,” and commit to these characters,
we'd be mainlining awesome rather than just sampling it.
It'
been two years since giant robots first battled in the streets, and the
surviving Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), joined
by many new arrivals from deep space, have joined forces with their US
military friends like Major Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Master Sergeant Epps
(Tyrese Gibson) to form NEST, a strike force devoted to hunting down a
relentless wave of Decepticon stragglers. Meanwhile, the humans who
first encountered the Transformers are trying to move on with their lives.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is going away to college, vowing to maintain
a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox).
Boxing up his mementos of his moment of world-saving glory, Sam discovers
an old piece of The Cube, that magical energy source that turns machines
into living robots. Not only does it animate a house full of the
Witwickys' electronics, it also downloads a set of ancient symbols into
his brain. This complicates his already crappy transition to college
life, where he's joined by entrepreneurial roommate Leo (Ramon Rodriguez)
and stalked by the very insistent Alice (Isabel Lucas). Sam's visions
start a whole new round of trouble because the Decepticons believe them
to be the secret to first resurrecting Megatron (voice of Hugo Weaving)
and then bringing to Earth their long-lost ruler The Fallen (voice of Tony
Todd). This ancient robot has a plan of his own, and it involves
the small matter of exterminating all life on Earth.
For
all its' problems with balance and tone, the biggest issue with Revenge
of the Fallen is that it's simply got too many characters. Too
many people, too many robots, just too much of everything to focus on the
things that worked so well the last time. Wikipedia lists 30 different
Autobots, Decepticons, Primes and Pretenders with primary roles and even
more glimpsed in cameos, and I'm not even counting the seven different
machines that combine to create the awesome climactic nasty Devastator.
To make room, the robots from the first movie, particularly Optimus Prime,
are seriously marginalized, and far, far too much screen time is devoted
to those irritating “Twins” Mudflap (Reno Wilson) and Skins (Tom Kenny),
who're pretty much robot versions of Amos and Andy.
Committing
a familiar sequel sin, returning writers Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
and their new partner Ehren Kruger insist on generating unnecessary conflict
among the main characters. Courageous, likable Sam is forced to not
only turn his back on a simple request by Optimus to speak to the President
on the Autobots' behalf, but he even inexplicably allows himself to be
distracted by some college party from his very first planned online date
with Mikaela (in which event 95% of American heterosexual males would gladly
volunteer to take his place). Sam's parents are once again wildly
overplayed by Kevin Dunn and Julie White, and their manic mood swings and
a nasty sequence where White gets stoned on hash brownies is show-stoppingly
awful. The writers also cast President Obama as an Autobot-phobe
who uses a weasely intermediary (John Benjamin Hickey) to treat them like
second-class citizens (anybody else think the filmmakers expected John
McCain to be President once their movie was released? Nobody actually
says Obama's name on-screen but it's looped in several times). The
question I ask is, when The Fallen's looking to snuff out the sun, why
is any of this necessary?
But
when the movie can get out of its' own way, which happens with more and
more regularity after we leave Sam's unnamed college behind at the one
hour mark, it's still entertaining on the strength of a solid collection
of summer movie heroes. LaBeouf is the real deal, a charismatic movie
star who can make me forgive Sam's self-absorbed teenage foibles because
he's such a basically good guy. Fox has a long, long way to go as
an actress, but she's energetic and likable as Mikaela. She reminds
me a lot of Jennifer Connelly at her age, and that beautiful young woman
of limited skill blossomed into one of our finest actresses in her 30's.
It's such a shame the movie doesn't get more mileage out of Cullen as the
iconically awesome Optimus Prime, but it does once again showcase Weaving's
sinister vocal stylings as the diabolical Megatron. John Turturro,
who walked on both sides of the line between comic relief and embarrassment
in the original, this time is a delight taking his Agent Simmons character
in surprising new directions. Seeing Duhamel once again effortlessly
ooze All-American heroism as Lennox, I can't understand how he's been unable
to break through as a genuine movie star.
The
newcomers aren't so lucky. We'll start with the positives.
I previously mentioned the utterly awesome Devastator, who goes so far
as to tear the friggin' PYRAMIDS apart in the climax, and Lucas is both
a striking beauty and does everything she can with a role that's long on
potential but short on logic. And it's fun to see 24's Glenn
Morshower living so large as NEST's commander he's actually named General
Morshower. On the other side, like the irksome Twins, Leo is a lot
more sidekick than anybody needs, and he ultimately contributes nothing
but lame one-liners to the battle against the Decepticons. The Fallen
is a dud, too much buildup for a character who racks up barely 10 minutes
of screentime. Notions of Transformer Gods and Afterlife get tossed
around suggesting intriguing avenues the movie is either unwilling or unable
to pursue. And even beyond the Twins, the movie is filled with little
robots given stereotypical ethnic attributes that would feel at home in
Star
Wars, Episode 1.
But
all this story and character stuff will be irrelevant to much of the movie's
target audience. The question is, how's the robot action? Answer:
pretty darn good. Once again, it lacks the solid logistics and strategic
logic of the first movie's utterly believable action, but the blow-out
climactic battle in Egypt pretty much looks like the inside of an 8-year-old's
mind (soldiers, alien robots and pyramids? All we're missing is dinosaurs
and I expect they'll be along in the next sequel). What's so breathtaking
is just how much all these elements really seem to be together in the same
frame. The big robots are so imaginatively designed and have a sense
of real weight (The Fallen aside). It all ends a bit abruptly and
doesn't have a lot of dramatic weight, but it sure does look cool and the
actors do their best to invest the slugfest with gravitas.
In
some ways, Michael Bay is as much of an auteur as anybody working today,
but the man who cornered the market on the awesome excesses of action cinema
has an annoying tendency to also lean hard on plain old excess. Excusing
the Bad Boys franchise (which can at least claim comedians in the
lead roles), Bay's just not a funny filmmaker, but that doesn't stop him
from making movies that just keep slapping you in the back and insisting
they're hilarious. At his best (The Rock, The Island),
he keeps his eyes on action and gravitas, but 8 movies into his career,
it's becoming clear that a misguided sense of humor is at least as big
a weakness as all that cutting that drives people crazy. How I'd
love to see a Transformers flick that doesn't care about keeping
people who're not interested in shape-shifting robots entertained!
It
seems like I say this a lot during the summer. Were Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen our first meeting with Sam Witwicky, Optimus
Prime and Megatron, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining as it is.
But because those characters pack a lot of goodwill, and because the movie
magic that brings them to life is still utterly formidable, this messy,
self-amused sequel is good enough to get by. But it's a shame to
see this already flawed franchise trending down so quickly, and on subsequent
viewings I fear there's less here than meets the eye. |
