In the old Looney Toons cartoons that I watched every Saturday morning, Foghorn Leghorn would torture his farm-dog nemesis by jamming a metal bucket on his head and then banging on it with a wooden spoon. I never knew what that felt like until Michael Bay did to me for two-and-a-half hours with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
At once a feature-length ad for the military, a soft-core Maxim spread featuring Megan Fox, and an extremely loud music video, Bay's second shot at turning the popular '80s toy/cartoon into an action flick is the sort of film that people suggest you "turn your brain off" to watch. It would be nice if that actually worked, but with Bay insisting that you pay attention to EVERY! LOUD! THING! that he throws at the screen, you can't even allow your mind to wander to, say, your grocery list, or what you had for dinner, the way you can with a normal bad movie.
There's a sliver of a plot buried within all the cacophonous bedlam, mostly shared during intermittent info-dumps during which one character will recite a confusing swath of mumbo-jumbo about the evil Decepticons' home planet or the purpose of the gizmo du jour that Shia LaBeouf is running around trying to find. Everyone ends up in Egypt in a turn that feels suspiciously like the plot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but the plot isn't really important. In fact, you could watch this movie dubbed into Urdu, and it would make just as much sense.
No, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is about just three things: Megan Fox wearing skimpy clothes and mouth-breathing through her glossed, pouty lips, Army guys blowing stuff up, and giant robots fighting. Bay can add all the expository speeches he likes, but it still doesn't mean there's an actual story.
As for the robots fighting, Bay seems to have heeded criticism of his earlier Transformers flick, and increased the amount of robot-on-robot action. The problem is that the design of the Autobots and Decepticons is so convoluted, consisting of thousands of different chunks of unidentifiable stuff all smashed together to make an approximation of a robot, that when two 'bots clash it's like watching a couple of giant scrap-metal heaps roll around on each other, accompanied by outrageously loud clanking noises and ear-splitting soundtrack music. Only by catching a glimpse of blue or yellow can you (maybe) figure out which scrap pile you're supposed to be rooting for as you wonder, did that robot just hit the other one? Was that his face or his arm? What in the Sam Hill am I looking at?
Light moments between robot fight scenes are provided by lowbrow comedy designed to appeal to young boys and very, very stupid people. Gags involving family dogs humping each other -- twice -- foreshadow a small robot later in the film doing the same to Fox's leg. Robots fart. One robot has enormous metal balls hanging between his legs, approximating testicles. And a pair of comedy-relief 'bots provide the most jaw-droppingly offensive characters in a sci-fi flick since Jar-Jar Binks -- they have huge jug ears and bugged-out eyes, one has a gold tooth, and they talk about "popping a cap" in another robot.
In case you missed it at the top of this review, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is two-and-a-half hours long. That's the same length as the Harry Potter films, which attempt to adapt 500-page novels to the screen. And two-and-a-half hours of Michael Bay is easily two hours too many.