by Donald Lind

Created on: July 04, 2009

"Transformers 2": A Movie of Extremes"

Michael Bay almost has a film style all his own; he has a great knack for visual flair and for making things go "boom." His certain style tends to overwhelm a lot of character development, story and dialogue in many of his movies, but when he turns his visual style up, his weaknesses can be covered up to make an entertaining film.

That said, he was probably the only guy to have made a live-action version of "Transformers" work. The very idea of small machines morphing into giant fighting robots that wage war against each other in shallow-for-a-cartoon-plots is silly in general, but the pure bombast and special effects Bay brought to the 2007 original made it much like the rest of his filmography: light on cinematic substance, but full of escapist fun.

The first film's success led to the inevitable sequel, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," and this sequel pushes the limits of how far Bay's big bang theory of filmmaking can carry him. Bay's range appears to be total extremes: on one end, he can make the film so over-the-top with the visuals and pyro, that people will either be left breathless by it or numbed and bored by it, while on the other end, it can be a clunky mess, crude and obnoxious that it turns people off. When he finds the right mix, he is great, like in "The Rock," and when he's at his worst, you get stuff like "Pearl Harbor" and "Bad Boys II."

One thing about "Revenge of the Fallen" is that it is never boring and dull. On the contrary, it borders on sensory overload. This is a film that shows Bay's style of filmmaking at both extremes. When the movie works, it works extremely well. When it doesn't, it starts to fight "Pearl Harbor" for the title of his worst film.

You might think the filmmakers could come up with any sort of excuse for a rematch for the alien refugees from the dead planet Cybertron, and not have to worry about convolutions, but writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Ehren Kruger give it their best shot to make the Continuity Police's heads explode. For the sake of completion, let's at least try to write a reasonable description of the plot:

Two years after their victory over the dreaded Decepticons, the Autobots, led still by Optimus Prime (still pitch-perfect Peter Cullen) now team up with a special U.S. task force, headed by Maj. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson) on a mission to find and wipe out any further Decepticon forces on Earth.

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