Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 61

Caution: Some spoilers.

Transformers the movie came to theatres like an event, not just a film. As a fan of the Hasbro toys during my youth, and the cartoon I knew I would go to experience it. I have always thought director Michael Bay was on the cutting edge of action film technology and after Bad Boys 2 thought his work was just plain cool. However Transformers failed to recapture the fun I previously enjoyed with the concept and ruined any fun I may have gotten from visiting the theatre; disappointing.

The movie kicks into gear mixing action with comedy. Shia LaBeouf does a fine job in the lead role, however the jokes start to run thin before the middle of the film. Eventually they went from humorous to just plain corny and the moments were as awkward as seeing a stand up comedian bomb on stage. The jokes and action began to seem diluted down to a kids movie, which the film could very well have been made to cater exclusively to such, however what it does is try to walk a tight rope between adults and children; teetering and falling off. Comedic performance by man and machine just grew annoying.

The action, aside from big computer robots, is standard Bay. Several time as one watches fancy new cars come driving through smoke and racing around to rock music, they surely pause and think: this is a car commercial! Product placement was heavy in this film and quite apparent, with close ups on name brands on computer chips, to cell phone brand names being called out, to a soda machine turning into a Transformer.

Michael Bay has directed some awesome action scenes in the past and with this new film he basically revisited each of them like some sort of film cannibal. The shoot out from Bad Boys 2 where they are in the house of the Jamaican pirates is basically done again only with a robot in a bunker room. When the Transformers fall to Earth he makes sure to make a joke about how it is cooler than Armageddon and near the end when Shia runs into a large building the camera shot looks awful close to one of the destructive ones used in that Bruce Willis film as well. The car chase scenes fell flat when compared to his work in the Bad Boys franchise, The Rock, or even The Island; even with the giant robots who apparently ice skate on pavement. The other similarity to another film that stuck out to me was a battle sequence where the army men are trying to call for help, but the operator on the other end of the phone will not connect the call without a credit