Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 3 stars

I was spoiled by the website io9.com about the ideal way to watch this movie, and it's really the only way of viewing which allows the movie to make any sense. The film is so bereft of plot that the only possible explanation is that plot has been intentionally disregarded in an attempt to deconstruct the summer action blockbuster. Making a film any bigger, louder, or stupider would take such large sums of money and such dearths of talent as to be practically impossible. If we regard this as the film's goal, instead of assuming the traditional aims of entertaining the audience or dramatizing the human condition, the film is a resounding success.

About that "plot": leaving subplots aside, the basic plot is that our hero Sam finds a shard of the Transformers' life-giving artifact, thought destroyed at the beginning of the first film, and spends the rest of the film trying to keep it away from the nefarious Decepticons who wish to destroy the sun (and with it, all life on earth). Whew. This bare-bones structure is nonspecific enough to allow director Michael Bay to hang all of the action-movie cliches he can on it. These include but are not limited to: the hero's hot girlfriend who in reality would have nothing to do with such a nebbish; racist jive-talking sidekicks; battles royales at an ancient site (the Pyramids, playing themselves) and in the streets of an Asian city (Shanghai, which may have been played by Vancouver for all we can tell about what happens there); pot brownies; a deadly female robot assassin; a visit by our hero to a strange dimension where he is given sage advice from the dead; a rogue ex-government agent; a Christ allegory; a tech-head sleazeball roommate; submarine battles; aliens who visited the ancient Egyptians; and the always-humorous spectacle of a tiny robot humping a pretty girl's leg.

Make no mistake: this movie is long (2.5 hours) and not exactly entertaining for long stretches. Regarding the film episodically, taking each new cliche as a self-contained unit, breaks up the monotony somewhat. If we are not expecting anything to actually occur, it is mildy amusing to wonder which new trope will be trotted out next. The explosions are many, they are well-staged, and they build nicely in intensity as the film progresses. While some of the action scenes toward the end tend toward the "indistiguishable mass of metal" look, most of the film is coherent, and Bay has taken care to cover his beloved explosions from all angles. You probably already know if you are the target audience for this film, but if (like me) you're not squarely in that demographic, playing "spot-the-cliche" can be quite a rewarding way to pass the movie's running time.