Can Michael Bay make a good movie or what? Well, no he cannot. The better question is does he even try? I don't think I can answer that. To his credit, after the first Transformers movie, he could've released video of a giant robot giving the camera the finger under the Transformers title, and made $500,000,000 (which is basically what he did). This is the kind of movie one would expect a hyperactive 5-year-old to make if handed a $200 million budget.
Let me preface this review by saying that Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was the worst movie I have ever seen, and I've seen Crazy/Beautiful. It was a waste of everyone's time. Nothing in the movie made any sense. If you had asked "why did that character do that?" you could've been talking about anyone doing anything and there wouldn't be an answer. My senior-year dorm room, in which every surface was covered in gnats, was less of a mess.
I would normally throw in a "Spoiler Alert" but as there is no conceivable plot in Transformers' third installment, there's nothing to give away....
The movie starts with our "everyman," Sam Witwicky, played by Shia Labeouf (who is just a terrible actor). When we meet Sam, he is being woken up by his smoking-hot, scantily-clad girlfriend, whom the camera has followed through an enormous apartment. This is how out-of-touch Michael Bay is with his audience. His "everyman" has a better life than any of us can dream of despite being a smarmy douchebag. Yet, we are supposed to sympathize with him because he is looking for a job? Ohhhhh, because being supported by your hot-ass girlfriend, who by the way is conveniently filthy rich, is a horrible way to live. Fuck you.
This is his girlfriend, who may as well not have a name.Sam's love for this broad is supposed to be the driving force behind every move he makes throughout the entire movie, yet their relationship is about as developed as my uterus.
Celebrated actors like Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, and John Turturro (in a role reprised from the earlier films) play characters that are like jokes that only Michael Bay gets. They are quirky in ways that have nothing to do with anything else in the movie. Bay's idea of character development is making McDormand's character -- a director of some super-secret government organization -- wear sneakers and resent being called ma'am; or Malkovich's character -- Sam's boss -- not allow red cups on a certain floor of the office building which is supposed to be all-yellow. Likewise, Bay's idea of an homage is naming the Autobot who gives cool inventions to the others -- an already obvious reference to Q, from James Bond -- Que... pronounced Q. Yup. Imagine if the main character in The Matrix was named Geezus Kryst.
The main plot -- the one about the titular robots -- does not make one shred of sense. The idea is for the bad guys to transport their allies, and then their entire home planet to Earth and enslave the human race. And of course, the best way to do this is instantly killing every human in sight once they arrive. Although the main bad guys are setting up shop in Chicago for their world takeover, they reference other transporters/bad guys stationed around the Earth one time... and then never mention them again. Did they transport mad peeps? Are they still at-large? Apparently not since the movie is over once the good guys win the battle of Chicago.
I mean, fuck this movie. Did Michael Bay really think anyone would believe that all of the Autobots were killed off in a rocket-ship explosion half-fucking-way through the movie? Every single one? What kind of fucking country-ass rube did you have to be to have gasped when they all returned shortly thereafter, having not been on the rocket at all?
Bay also manage to assassinate the only interesting sub-plot that had accidentally developed -- a defeated, unhinged, and power-starved Megatron's desperate attempts to resurge from his hiding in the deserts of Africa to the top of the world -- when the almighty Megatron falls prey to the main bimbo pulling the old too-bad-the-other-guy-is-gonna-have-all-the-power trick.
Oh, and also, regular guns now work on Transformers. Sometimes. And sometimes they don't. And at one point Sam's mom wonders, out-loud mind you, about the size of her son's penis. Fuck.
- Carmine
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