This isn't one of those negative reviews where the critic bemoans how stupid the big summer blockbuster is (although Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is stupid beyond belief. Screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman claim that Michael Bay locked them in a hotel room for a month to write this movie; they obviously spent 29 and a half days watching pay per view porn and ordering room service); those kinds of pans are from sticks in the mud who either don't get blockbuster films or who are fighting a battle we lost back in 1985. No, this is one of those negative reviews that looks at a two and a half hour movie about giant robots fighting each other and asks just one question:

How can this movie be so fucking boring?

It's astonishing. Coming off of the very successful (and highly entertaining) Transformers, Michael Bay had the opportunity to make a movie that delivered chaos and destruction to his heart's delight. Instead he reveals a fetish for comic relief characters (there are SEVEN OR EIGHT comic relief characters in this film, many of whom spend most of the running time hanging out together) and a profound inability to create any sense of pacing. Sitting through Revenge of the Fallen is a tedious experience, a slog through absolutely meaningless bullshit to get to action scenes that are so sloppy that they seem to have been improv'ed on the spot. If the action scenes in the first film struck you as hard to follow you'll likely have no idea what's going on in the action scenes in this film. ILM has created photo-real giant robots that are fantastically detailed with thousands of moving parts and then failed to come up with any way to let the audience tell them apart. There are scenes in the final battle where I had literally - without hyperbole - no idea if the one robot hitting the other robot was a good guy or bad guy, let alone which character was which. The action scenes become semi-impressionistic melanges of metalic parts and explosions. Fights take place in featureless landscapes to hide the fact that not even the director has a single clue who is doing what in relation to which characters.

It seems so simple: deliver more and bigger robot action. But Bay keeps coming back to the human characters, not a single one of which are interesting or otherwise diverting. The film sidelines the Autobots (who are now working closely with the US military) for nearly the entire running time, and instead we're forced to hang out with a team of unfunny, irritating misfits. When John Turturro's returning Sector Seven agent is your most nuanced character you know you've really shit the bed.

And the action, when it's decipherable, offers nothing new. There's not a moment in this movie that threatens to even come close to the set pieces in the first, forget about topping them. In fact the lengthy final battle (which is like a fractal element of the entire film, as it is stuffed with filler and irritating comedy) appears to completely recycle the location of the Scorponok scene in the first movie. There's a fight in a forest that could have offered up some exciting possibilities, but besides the obvious pummeling with trees, the scene is forgettable. Walking into a movie like Transformers you must have your expectations lowered, but the one place that you hope to be impressed is with spectacle. Michael Bay fails at this, the most basic part of his job as a junk food director.

I never want to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen again, but if I did, I would like to bring a stopwatch. I would want to time the interminable filler scenes to see if they are as long as they feel. Does the scene where Shia's mom accidentally eats pot brownies and freaks out (which in no way, shape or form advances the story OR the characters. It's the actual definition of filler) really go on for as long as it seems? Does the movie really take an almost hour long break from any action to have the characters sneak into the Smithsonian and get an exposition dump from a robot before wandering in the desert for a while? The middle of the movie, about an hour where the film simply treads water, is the cinematic equivalent of the event horizon of a black hole, where time just slows down and a second lasts an eternity.

Critiquing the actors in this film is almost a waste of time. Shia LaBeouf is given nothing that even approximates a character; at the junket Orci and Kurtzman gave some lip service to this being his character's Refusal of the Call story (any time a writer references the Monomyth, tell them to fuck off), but that's not present in the movie. There's nothing in the movie; the character of Sam Witwicky simply moves from location to location and from scene to scene as... well, I was going to say as the story dictates, but Revenge of the Fallen has almost no story at all. It's simply a series of events that are interconnected but never really add up to anything. I know that saying an action movie 'has no story' is pretty cliche by now, but I think Revenge of the Fallen is almost literally plotless; there are a couple of vague ideas about plot - the Fallen wants revenge and Sam has info in his brain that he wants - but that's just about it. It's like a movie based on a TV Guide description.

Everybody else ranges from servicable to horrifyingly bad. Ramon Rodriguez, who plays Shia's new (comic relief) roommate (who could be erased from the film without altering one single tiny piece of the story. At all. The character embodies uselessness), should never again be allowed to act. Or at least he should never be allowed to start acting, since the hideous mugging he does in this film shares no DNA with what we know as acting. Megan Fox remains attractive but as long as Michael Bay is her director we'll never know if she's capable of anything else. And everyone else: most embarrass themselves and their families, but they have paychecks to comfort them. Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel have such small roles in this film that they come across as master thespians in their few moments of screentime.

I hated this movie. Despised it. During the screening I turned to Aint It Cool News' Mr. Beaks and said 'This is grueling.' He checked his watch and less than an hour had gone by - and we hadn't even gotten to the real filler yet (there is enough filler in this movie to provide the entire runtime of another film. There's about 90 minutes of absolute nothing smack dab in the center of Revenge of the Fallen). And we hadn't even gotten to the point where it became obvious that no one involved in the film cared enough to craft even the most rudimentary of stories or to be concerned about even the most simple of continuity: at one point the characters walk out of the back door of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and end up blatantly in Arizona at the Sorona Desert Airplane Graveyard. It's a breathtaking moment of not giving a shit, one that gives you an idea of how little thought and care went into the construction of the film.

What bums me out is that there's not even much to laugh at in this movie. There's a scene at the end where Shia dies and goes to robot heaven (and I am not making this up), but that's too little too late. If the rest of the movie had featured that kind of inane absurdity I might have been able to take the ride, but the rest of the movie is just dull.

The thing about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is that it's an objectively bad film. The comedy doesn't work (and there's oh so fucking much of it), the characters are so flat you can't see them from the side, the plot has so many holes you begin to think surrealism was the point, the actors are bored, the action scenes are incoherent, the finale is a staggering anti-climax, the villain makes cyphers seem fully rounded, the pacing perfectly replicates the concept of 'death march'... there's nothing that works in this film. The fact that the illusion of movement is created onscreen may be Michael Bay's greatest and only triumph in this movie. Terry Schiavo would have been bored by this bloated, ponderous piece of shit.

Note: I saw the film in IMAX. Only a few minutes of the film are shot in true IMAX, and those minutes are not complete sequences. Random shots will appear in IMAX, meaning that the aspect ratio for one shot will change. Take into account how quick your average Michael Bay shot is and you'll understand how bizarre this decision was. Another sign that nobody making the movie gave a shit.

1 out of 10