Bang! Crash! Kaboom! There goes the Richter scale, etc etc. That deafening sound can only be another Michael Bay Molotov being hurled into a multiplex near you. Microbots fans everywhere must have cheered when it was announced that the bombastic talent behind Pearl Harbor and The Rock would direct a live action epic featuring their sworn rivals, the Transformers.
Well, plus ça change. These iconic Hasbro toys, lest we forget, are accustomed to whoring themselves around various media with all sorts of people (Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, er, Judd Nelson) attached. The canny Japanese innovation behind Transformers – it’s a car and a robot! – might well have inspired the ringing of tills all by itself. But like other notable exercises in synergy of that era – He-Man, She-Ra, My Little Pony – it was the cartoon spin-off that ensured the Transformers’ place in all ‘I Love 1980s’ ventures.
Two decades on and the same ankle biters who enjoyed turning Optimus Prime into a truck or Megatron into a tank are valuable bums on seats, a fact not lost on Hollywood mavens, a shrewdness of suits never known to pass up an opportunity to milk a demographic dry.
So there you have it. This is a remarkably cynical $125million movie based on remarkably cynical Saturday morning animation based on a unit-shifting toy, and all directed by a man whose most recent efforts include the asinine flop The Island and the blockheaded Bad Boys 2.
It ought to be as useless as a pogo stick in a retirement home, but by golly it isn’t. Bay’s excesses, for once, replicate the sensation of playing with gargantuan action toys. Few will not be moved to pick their jaw off the floor when an 18-wheel trailer-tractor, comprised of 10,108 moving parts, suddenly morphs into Optimus Prime.
Ironically, what sets Transformers apart from such stupefying Bay meltdowns as Armageddon is something almost like humanity. Trust Mr. Bay to find it in the plastic and metal. Shimmering with Spielbergian gloss, at heart, this is a teen movie just as surely as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was. Shia LaBeouf, Hollywood’s current hot ticket, plays Sam Witwicky, an adolescent struggling with the stupidity of the adult world, a realm represented by thinly veiled allusions to certain Bush instigated conflicts. No matter. Sam is far more concerned with a girl (the appositely named Ms. Fox) and his clapped-out first car.
Happily, said vehicle turns out to be Bumblebee, no longer a Volkswagon, but a yellow Camaro capable of shifting shape. He, like the rest of the Transformers, have come to Earth to prevent the nefarious Decepticons from gaining control of the All Spark, an all-powerful cube. Or something. A final stand off sees Mr. Bay back to his old tricks. The sustained battle at the end of the film is simply too long and too confusing to hold our attention.
Still, you can’t argue with most of it – Mr. LaBeouf is charming and charismatic, the bit players (Bernie Mac as a used car salesman, John Turturro as a wacky government agent, etc) are consistently funny, and, oh yes, there are big fuck-off robots.