Hailed as the popcorn flick of the summer of 2007, Transformers is a really bad movie with great special effects. So I guess that’s what passes for popcorn flick these days: overproduced, underwritten, crappy movies. I know, I shouldn’t be surprised. I watched this travesty over the Thanksgiving weekend. Quite appropriate, since it was a turkey.

Like most summer blockbusters, Transformers suffers from trying to cram two or three different movies into one. We’ve got Movie A, with a platoon of Army guys fighting the Decepticons; there’s Movie B, with Shia LaBeouf attempting to get laid; and Movie C, with hackers trying to solve the mystery of the Decepticons’ signal.

Movie C is the worst: they introduce 2-3 hackers (who are apparently at the beck and call of the U.S. military, because hackers are always helpful to authorities), only to drop two of those characters, add an annoying new hacker/comedy relief guy (who isn’t funny), then have them type a lot of crap on terminals. I love movie hackers who can find answers in five seconds that no one else can. There’s a lot of shouting "Cut the hardlines" in Movie C, like it meant something.

Movie A and B are equally bad. Truthfully, I don’t even remember any of the character names of the Army guys (there was guy with glasses who you knew was going to get killed, bald black guy, and guy who looks like Michael Biehn but isn’t). And Shia Labouf just makes me worry about how bad he’ll be in the new Indiana Jones movie.

Here are a few of the problems I had with the movie:

• Music totally ripped off the Terminator theme, and not in a winking, respectful way.
• Army guys big plan is to move the "All-Spark" (the McGuffin of the movie) from a fairly remote area to the middle of a busy city: had to have a place for massive collateral damage, I guess.
• Optimus Prime doesn’t show up until over an hour into the movie. WTF? It reminded me of another lame expensive movie: King Kong. It took over an hour for the title character to appear in that movie, too.
• Transformers taking the shape of crappy American cars. Autobots, brought to you by GMC/Pontiac.
• Related to the above: product placement up the wazoo. It seemed like every frame of this move had some product in it. It was visually tiring. Ebay, Xbox, Nokia, Ding Dongs, etc.
• At least two of the action set pieces revolve around making fricking phone calls. In fact, I think the reason they wanted to go to the big city was to make a phone call. That would make three, but I wasn’t paying any attention.

Ways this movie could have been improved:

• This movie is two and a half hours long and only needed to be about an hour. It actually would have been better if they replaced the movie with five episodes of the cartoon.
• Funnier if you mentally replace references to the All-Spark with Old Spice.
• Fire all the actors. And the writers. And the director.

At the end of the movie, our horny teen loser, having finally impressed the girl by shoving the All-Spark into Megatron’s chest, is making out with her. On top of his Transformer buddy’s hood. All the other Autobots are watching. It’s like they came from another planet to watch teens having sex (or to have teens have sex on top of them). Either way, that would have been a better movie.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Movies, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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