Tuesday 7 August 2007

Transformers: A Review

I'm probably just the right age, at 36, to be a fan of the original Transformers and to carry my fanboyish obsession over to the new movie and, thus, be bitterly disappointed by it. The original toys and cartoons, however, passed me by. That didn't stop me from being disappointed by the movie though.

In many ways there's nothing particularly wrong with it. If you don't think at all about anything and go along with the chases and the fighting then it's a loud, frenetic, popcorn movie with a slight fetish for big shiny things (and if they go "Boom!" all the better).

It's Micheal Bay directing a movie based on a line of toys from Hasbro. I'm not sure you should expect anything more (or less) than what there is.

And yet...

Less is more, as they say, and more is less. Also, for completists, less is less and more is more. There seemed to be about half a dozen too many robots who looked like each other and I didn't care for; some even died and I'm not entirely sure which, or whose side they were on. There were about three too many action scenes, many too many unfunny comedy scenes (although John Turturro going ballistically over the top was horribly watchable like many of the pile-ups in the film) and there were so many "in-jokes" that at times you felt you were watching the DVD-extra gag reel.

Peter Cullen rewarded the fans' faith in him with a good voice performance as Prime, not that he had much to do past exposition. Shia LaBeouf, however, should probably be renamed Shia LaJambon. And its a good job that I'd seen Anthony Anderson in The Shield because his Jar Jar Binks role here was almost unforgivable.

Then there's the plot holes....

But no. It may mark a new nadir for the "mindless" part of mindless fun, but it did, mostly, manage the "fun" part, especially compared to recent more po-faced blockbusters. Not great, not particularly good but it passed the time.

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