There I sat as the final scene faded out and Michael Bay’s name popped onto the screen completely spellbound that people were cheering and clapping over the gamut of crap they were just fed. I’m amazed at just how low the audience had set the bar for the sequel to 2007’s ‘Transformers’. When I look at movies like ‘Star Trek’ that succeed on so many fronts I find it hard to believe that these same audiences go into movies like ‘Revenge of the Fallen’ cheering for Sam and Optimus the same way they cheered for Kirk and Spock. Here’s six reasons to avoid Michael Bay’s latest.

Cheap Humor

Humor is the way to the audience’s heart. Make them laugh and you’re bound to at least have an entertaining movie. Everybody knows that ‘Tranformers’ wasn’t a masterpiece, but it definitely had it’s funny moments most of which were carried out by Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky.  Sam’s humor in this movie is almost completely gone, probably because he’s “grown up” now, and has been passed over to his mother who went from being a nice, relatable mom in the first movie to that of ridiculous caricature. Just when you think she’s stopped with her antics, they keep on coming as she continues to make an ass of herself. Sam’s father, who had such great rapport with his wife in the first film, ends spending a majority of the time running damage control.

At one point in the film Sam points to his arm where he’s drawn a symbol and asks two of the new autobots Mudflap and Skids, who are clearly “black” and voiced by a white guy, if they can read it. They respond with “no, no, we don’t do much reading” giving us yet another example of Michael Bay’s descent signature ethnic stereotyping.

Sam’s roommate Leo proves to be one of the most forced and useless comic reliefs in the film. He had no reason to go along in the journey neither contributing to the plot nor helping Sam reach his goal. And let’s not forget the several cut aways to Sam’s dogs humping each other. Hilarious.

None of the Characters Are Worth Caring For

In ‘Transformers’ we followed Sam as he went through his many firsts such as his first car and girlfriend. These are the types of experiences that people can relate to and make him a character worth watching. This is all counteracted when we hit ‘Revenge’. Sam decides to not take his extra terrestrial transforming car to college claiming that “freshman aren’t allowed to have cars”. From there he hooks up with the first girl who pushes him onto a bed effectively nullifying our sympathies for him when he and Mikaela start getting into arguments.

Speaking of Mikaela, Megan Fox deserves special mention here as her mannequin-esque performance shows that she is actually regressing rather than advancing as an actress. When she’s not keeping her lip gloss fresh in the middle of the desert her character’s dialogue is limited to begging Sam to tell her he loves her and that she’ll never leave him no matter what, almost as if the writers were channeling their inner teenage fantasies into the script.

On top of all this, my suspension of disbelief tends to fly out of the window after I see people tossed around by Herculean robots and never get hurt. Half the falls that Sam takes in this movie should have made him a paraplegic yet he walks away from every one of them without a scratch, except of course for the one time his real life hand injury had to be added into the movie. It’s hard to feel any suspense when you know that every character is impervious to harm.

The New Bots Are Worthless

The second Megatron comes back in the movie he flies off world to meet with his “master” The Fallen, a guy he completely neglected to mention in the first film but can’t go two seconds without talking about him in this movie. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that when we finally do see The Fallen in action he doesn’t pick up the slack where all his hype left off.

The new bots added to this installment, all 42 of them, serve no purpose aside from being more metal to put on screen. I would have loved to see more of Arcee, the only female robot, and Devastator is nice to see in IMAX but he’s so clunky it looks like he’s going to fall apart. And yes they do show his testicles.

The bots suffer from the same issues as their human counterparts. There’s no development for any of them and as a result, we don’t care when any of them get hurt or die.

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