Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Slow down - we have to keep this up for
another 149 minutes

Grade: D

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, and Ramon Rodriguez

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

To quote Team America: World Police (and shouldn’t we all?), “Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?” It is little surprise that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is as visually bleary and bombastic as Bay’s lucrative, aesthetically-reprehensible forerunner. Or that the plotline grafted together by usual suspects Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci is as mind-numbing as it is derivative. Or that Bay’s robotic approximation of women are as panting sexpots while African-Americans are jive-talkin’, gold tooth sportin' illiterates – “We don’t really do much reading,” admits Autobot Mudflap (voiced by white actor Tom Kenney) when asked to translate some ancient Transformer hieroglyphics. Or that Bay’s inferiority-fueled self-aggrandizement again rears its pathetic head: Following his passing homage to Armageddon during the last Transformers, the sequel features a Bad Boys poster plastered on the wall of a college dorm room and Bay revisiting Pearl Harbor when Decepticons demolish the U.S. Pacific fleet.

What is notable is that it only took almost 160 days for the first anti-Obama movie to snake its way into theaters. In the midst of an ongoing mission to root out and destroy Decepticons (codenamed NEST), a new National Security advisor and presidential liaison (John Benjamin Hickey) steps brashly onto the scene, aiming to dismantle the Autobot-human cooperation agreement – with the blessing of the new president, he continuously reminds us – under the foolhardy notion that if the U.S. military, er, Autobots simply left the Middle East, er, Earth, then Al-Qaeda, er, Decepticons would stand down and leave us in peace. And, if that 2x4 metaphor doesn’t smack you in the head hard enough, Bay makes sure that, during coverage of a Decepticon offensive, a CNN television reporter conspicuously mentions that “President Obama” was being taken to an undisclosed location, and later, images of Obama are interspersed throughout a Decepticon terrorist video played over hijacked television airwaves.

It is no wonder, then, that the film’s climactic donnybrook is fought in the middle of Egypt, or that the only Arab country to come to the aid of American soldiers are the Jordanians. Still, even if Bay’s conception of geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy is as shallow as Megan Fox’s Daisy Dukes, all would be forgiven if he had the dexterity to finally rise to the occasion and put some talent where his money is.

A college-age Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and main squeeze Mikaela (Fox, seen mostly running in slow motion wearing a halter top) again find themselves in the middle of a war for universal supremacy between the Transformers, including a resurrected Megatron (Hugh Weaving) and his master, The Fallen (Tony Todd). Megatron’s mission is to track down some hidden power thingamabob that the Fallen will use to revive a machine used to destroy the Sun, while also killing Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), since only a Prime can vanquish the Fallen.

Frankly, I have seen backstories to Mario series video games with more depth than this storyline – indeed, sitting through Transformers is like watching a 150-minute long arcade game. Any serious attempt to decipher the pointless plotline, with its pilfered elements from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings, is stymied by a nonstop hail of gunfire and other assorted weaponry that riddles every scene. It’s not enough to suffer the constant barrage of shape-shifting robots veering wildly across the screen; Bay throws in helicopters, cargo carriers, fighter jets, motorcycles, battleships, submarines, tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, and an unmanned aerial drone in a pear tree.

In order to stave off mental atrophy, I allowed my thoughts to wander, considering how – in a haphazard attempt to incorporate LaBeouf’s real-life hand injury – Sam manages to locate and dress himself with gauze and finger splints seconds after being violently teleported into the Sahara desert. Sadly, I wasn’t able to miss the juvenile yuks from two instances of dogs humping each other, which mirrors a later scene in which a miniature Transformer humps Fox’s leg.

Bay’s schoolyard notion of masculinity is epitomized by his steroid-infused filmmaking style. Perhaps it also accounts for why Mikaela’s chosen insult for Sam is to repeatedly call him “such a girl,” or why Bay expresses on odd predilection for testicles: First, Mikaela’s lands atop the gonads of Sam’s roommate (Ramon Rodriguez), then an ex-government agent (John Turturro) reports the coordinates of a mammoth Decepticon while hiding in the shadow of his dangling scrotum.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen might be a fanboys’ wet dream, but most audiences will find it rather flaccid. To further the scatology, this insipid, sensorially bloated film, like its predecessor, is merde that meets the eye.

Neil Morris

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Rail Rage

Grade: C

Director: Tony Scott

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Travolta, James Gandolfini, Luis Guzman, and John Turturro

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Tony Scott is like the Rafael Palmeiro of filmmaking. Both were mid-to-upper standouts in their respective fields until avarice and self-indulgence persuaded them to artificially – and detrimentally – enhance their innate abilities. For Palmeiro, it was taking steroids for more hits and homers. For Scott, it is the audio-visual gimcracks he has allowed to infect his films the past decade: The jump-cuts, the slow motion, the freeze frames, the oversaturated color schemes, the time-lapse photography, the clanging, hip-hop-lite soundtracks by Harry Gregson-Williams. Its false bravado masquerading as cocksure preening, with little but car crashes and actors yelling at the camera to approximate the illusion of narrative drive.

You will quickly realize it is business as usual in Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 when you hear the openings strains of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” a six-year-old rap song with no apparent contextual connection to the film. In between herky-jerky images of the New York City skyline and subway system, we glimpse the blurry apparition of Ryder (John Travolta), a tattooed, racist ex-commodities trader making his way underground where he will lead the hijacking of the 6 train from Pelham Bay Park.

Denzel Washington (appearing in his fourth collaboration with Scott) plays MTA dispatcher Walter Garber, presumably named in part after Walter Matthau, who played then-Lt. Zachery Garber in director Joseph Sargent’s fondly held 1974 film adaptation of John Godey’s source novel. Garber finds himself in the unfortunate position of ad hoc negotiator with Ryder, who demands $10 million in an hour or he will execute one hostage for every tardy minute.

The miscast Travolta never firmly establishes Ryder’s persona: One minute he is a shrewd, diabolical nemesis, the next a ranting, raving lunatic unraveling under the pressure of his hair-brained scheme. Every time the high-pitched Travolta shrieks one of his many MF-bombs, he sounds as if he’s reading them off cue cards.

The stolid screenwriting combo of David Koepp and Brian Helgeland meekly attempt to introduce some moral ambiguity into Garber’s character, a device that worked well when applied to Nick Nolte’s protagonist in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake. But, Garber’s “confession” that he once accepted a work-related bribe comes only under Ryder’s threat to shoot a hostage if Garber doesn’t come clean. If that’s not sanitized enough for you, he also reveals that he spent the bribe money on his kids’ college tuition.

Initial police suspicion that Garber might be working in cahoots with Ryder is an intriguing angle that would have added another dimension to the procedural plotline, but it dissipates without comment as quickly as it materializes. So, too, with the discovery that Ryder’s true financial target is not cash but rather stock market manipulation: The last time we hear anything about that is when the city’s mayor (James Gandolfini) announces he is marching down to the SEC to look into any of Ryder’s recent, suspicious transactions. Just a suggestion, I’d say all of them.

The film’s banality reaches its nadir when Scott rolls out the most anticlimactic ending this side of brother Ridley’s American Gangster. Let’s just say a crime rooted in intricate planning and cunning execution comes down to one guy walking across an overpass getting caught by another guy running across an overpass. If that sounds exciting, then boy, do I have a bridge to sell you.

Neil Morris