Transformers 2 reviews

I’m having lots more fun reading reviews of Transformers 2 than I possibly could by watching the damn thing.

And then there’s the “id” part, which is the part where stuff blows up real good, and huge machines smash each other up. And every single performance is so ridiculous that it looks down on “over the top” as if from a great height. It’s the part of your brain that thinks it would be awesome to see robots with giant dangling testicles, or hot chicks turning into robot tentacle monsters, or “ghetto” robots that talk in inept hip-hop slang and smash each other playfully, or funny Jewish men who talk about their “schmear” and randomly strip to their G-strings. Is that going too far? Then let’s go 100 times farther than that and see what happens!

– Charlie Jane Anders

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

– Roger Ebert

Watching “Revenge of the Fallen,” I got the overpowering sense that Michael Bay has been reined in over the years and given some semblance of storytelling discipline by his longtime producer Jerry Bruckheimer and “Transformers 1″ producer Steven Spielberg, but that on this movie (maybe because of the WGA strike, maybe because of the success of the last movie) Bay was finally let off the leash, as it were — with results that might be Bay’s purest auteurist statement, but which are also frankly kind of ugly.

– Mike Russell

… and lots more, in which even the reviews Rotten Tomatoes marks “positive” are pretty backhanded, as in “Good when it is good, but extremely, shockingly, horrifyingly bad when it is bad.”