I walked in to Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, with absolutely zero expectations. Michael Bay did a pretty decent job with the last Transformers movie, but I also know that that asshole is not to be trusted. A lot of people bring up the fact that, a million years ago, Michael Bay directed Bad Boys, as if this one redeeming moment was enough to make up for anything he might come up with later. With that one pretty good movie under his belt, Bay could just phone in the rest of his career, knowing that his 2044 lifetime achievement award was already on order and being polished for him. Armageddon was bad, The Island was worse, and watching Pearl Harbor ranks below certain dental procedures on my scale of fun things to do.
Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first, because there’s less of it.
1. Giant clusterfuck CGI robot fights: lots (and they look pretty good)
2. Hot girls who inexplicably want to fleouff LaBeouf: two (they also look pretty good).
And that’s it. These are both fun things to look at, but they don’t make a movie by themselves. The writing sucks, the (non-robot-fight) cinematography sucks, the acting sucks, and the whole idea behind the plot sucks. One nice thing about the first movie was that there was the core cast, which consisted of LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Optimus Prime, and Bumblebee, and they were all decently solid and backed up occasionally by OK supporting characters. The second movie introduces all these new bullshit characters that the movie doesn’t need, in a ham-handed effort to add some comic relief for some reason. Namely, we have:
1. Sam’s college roommate Leo, who plays the arrogant tech douche stereotype and who, despite talking a big game and following Sam into battle as an awkward third wheel, wets himself every time he hears a funny noise.
2. Galloway, the ever-predictable desk-jockey from the pentagon sent in by the president (Obama) to take over something that wasn’t broken and throw his bespectacled weight around yelling at guys twice his size so he can be a stallion with the wife later.
3. Mudflap and Skids, “The Twins”, two autobots who, despite being centuries old and from outer space, have picked up pretty much every negative African-American stereotype in the book from the past few decades, even proclaiming at one point that “we don’t read so good.”
The movie drags on and on, stretching a story that could be effectively summarized on the back of an envelope into 151 minutes of screen time. The new bad guys aren’t compelling, and transformers on both sides are killed and brought back to life so many times that the movie’s biggest attempt at an emotional scene falls flat. Oh yeah, and did I mention that there’s a love story crammed in there too? The entire movie, Megan Fox is trying to get Shia LaBeouf to tell her that he loves her. I am not making this up, and it is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
Transformers 2 is a shitty comedy shoved inside a shitty love story crammed into a shitty action movie. In short, it is the spoiled, rotten TurDuckEn of the movie world.
BUT, if you have a short attention span, a love for explosions, and $10 that you absolutely must get rid of immediately, see it, and you’ll probably enjoy it.
Filed under: Entertainment Rant, Stupid, Z | Tagged: megan fox, movie goat, the fallen, transformers, turducken | 5 Comments »
The countdown clock to my wedding will hit 5 months tomorrow. As I’m s-l-o-w-l-y finalizing plans, I got to thinking how much of the bullshit details are left up to me. I got annoyed for a split second, only to immediately have a vision of why it would probably be a bad idea to leave some decisions of this wedding up to my better half. So here goes, why men should never be left in charge of making wedding-related decisions:
The Happy Goat 