Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

What’s the Story?

After the events of Transformers, Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky is off to college. But the long-simmering war between the noble Autobots and the villainous Decepticons is about to boil over again as Sam learns he's the receptacle for eons-old information that everyone wants -- information that includes the location of a weapon that could be used to destroy the sun, along with all life on Earth.

Is It Any Good?

Whether you loved or hated the original Transformers, it made so much money that a sequel was inevitable. It was not, however, necessarily inevitable that said sequel would be good. The faults of the first film are even worse here -- director Michael Bay brings in robot after robot after robot, making it impossible to tell the metal mega-warriors apart and resulting in action scenes where who's doing what to who is conveyed more by screaming bystanders than clear, comprehensible filmmaking.

The human characters aren't much better -- the film bogs down in scenes where Sam's parents are concerned about him heading off to school, only to jettison all that in the name of globe-trotting action. The relationship between Sam and girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) is laughably thin, and the film's need to overdo everything results in either misshapen comic relief scenes or action scenes so loud and large and quickly cut that they're simply empty blurs. TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN is, at heart, the worst of everything that modern big-money moviemaking has to offer -- spectacle, sex, special effects, and sanitized violence -- without a single redeeming feature.