Sprinkle a random model here and there - which "Transformers" liberally does - and Bay must have been blissfully happy. Most audiences have eagerly slurped up Bay's bombastic action pictures, yet "Transformers" once again proves that he is the worst action director at work today. That's not to say "Transformers" is Bay's worst film.
The shots of planes contorting into menacing robots - for which you should really credit the effects wizards at ILM - are charged with giddy, geeky excitement. Shia LaBeouf, meanwhile, as a teen who gets trapped in a war between the robots, gives the movie a desperately needed dose of self-deprecation. Yet when it matters most - during the countless action sequences that dominate the film - Bay once again fails those of us who are guilty-pleasure connoisseurs of big-screen pyrotechnics.
The key is understanding the difference between a single shot and an entire scene. Bay, who got his start in television commercials, is a master of the gotcha shot - the perfectly lit, ingeniously framed, honey-soaked image that makes the trailers for his films so enticing. Yet aside from 2005's "The Island" - his single, curious exception - Bay has repeatedly proven incapable of staging a competent action sequence , in which a series of shots are arranged into a suspenseful yet logical order.
Things simply crash and explode in a Michael Bay film, often for no discernible reason. When the robots do battle in "Transformers," there is so much banging metal that you can't tell one foe from the other. You might as well be watching a car compactor at work in a junkyard.
Steven Spielberg is an executive producer of "Transformers," which is an irony considering his "Jurassic Park" provided a template for how this could have been done right. The things you remember from that film are not necessarily the chomping dinosaurs but the moments of tension leading up to those chomps (the water reverberating from the creature's footsteps, for instance). Consider even last week's "Live Free or Die Hard," directed by the hardly Spielbergian Len Wiseman ("Underworld").
The sequence in which a cop car is launched into a helicopter is as vehicle-centric as anything Bay could dream up, yet it has moments of anticipation and surprise built into it. It has, in a sense, its own narrative. "Transformers" mostly has nonsense, and it goes on for nearly two and a half hours.
I'm not sure that I played with my Transformers toys for that long in one sitting as a kid. There is a laborious prologue, which describes some sort of all-powerful cube that has landed on Earth, prompting good and bad Transformers from the planet Cybertron to come seeking it. There are actors such as Jon Voight and John Turturro mugging shamelessly as government officials.
Then there is an overblown and endless climax on a downtown street that appears to be populated only by models for Victoria's Secret. Still, "Transformers" does have cars and planes that turn into robots, and as a 10-year-old, that's all I would have expected. But as a 33-year-old with a fondness for "Live Free or Die Hard," "Casino Royale" and other action movies with wit and coherence, the chaotic hack work of "Transformers" isn't going to cut it.
Read more by Josh Larsen at LarsenOnFilm.com. Contact him at jplarsen@scn1.
com or 630-416-5206. Sprinkle a random model here and there - which "Transformers" liberally does - and Bay must have been blissfully happy.
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