In Theaters: Less Than Meets the Eye

Reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Hurt Locker

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Directed by Michael Bay
Starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro
**

I’ll say this about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen—it’s the closest we’ll ever get to seeing what an entirely unfiltered Michael Bay picture looks like.  Over the course of his career, the divisive director has established his own distinct (some would say, obnoxious) brand of visual pyrotechnics, but he’s always operated under the firm hand of experienced producers, including Jerry Bruckheimer and Steven Spielberg, who reined in some of his baser impulses.  With the second Transformers flick though, the parents have gone on vacation, leaving their teenage son with the keys to the family car, which he promptly drives into a cliff where it explodes in an enormous fireball.

If it weren’t for the fact that its guaranteed to become the summer’s biggest hit, Revenge of the Fallen is the kind of bloated, juvenile career-killer that would send its director from the blockbuster big leagues to the made-for-TV minors.  (Don’t believe me?  Just ask Jeremiah Chechik and Danny Cannon, the former big shots responsible for The Avengers and Judge Dredd respectively.)  Instead, Bay will live to direct another day, especially with Transformers 3 already slated for a 2011 release.  But you can bet that Papa Spielberg will be holding his son’s hand a lot more firmly on that installment.

In a strange way, you almost have to admire Bay for abandoning any pretense of producing a coherent three-act film.  So many blockbusters make cursory nods towards things like character development and thematic complexity when you can tell all they really want to do is just blow lots of shit up.  Bay gleefully bypasses all that nonsense about cinematic storytelling and cuts right to the (literal) chase…to say nothing of explosions, shoot-outs and giant robot brawls.  It would be easier to dismiss Revenge of the Fallen as mindless spectacle if you didn’t get the sense that Bay would wear that criticism as a badge of honor.  In fact, if he had his way, every film he made would undoubtedly be exactly like this one.

Rushed into production just as last year’s writer’s strike got underway, Bay started working on Transformers from an outline that was only turned into a proper script three months before the first day of shooting.  That abbreviated schedule explains why the film’s narrative makes little to no sense; returning screenwriters Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman (the scribes behind this summer’s other big hit, Star Trek) famously pitched the first Transformers as a simple “boy and his car” story embellished with lots and lots of rock ‘em, sock ‘em robot action.  Revenge of the Fallen, on the other hand, begins with a fairly straightforward premise—that boy Sam (Shia LaBeouf) going off to college, leaving his annoying parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White, even more grating than they were in the first film), porn-star ready girlfriend (Megan Fox) and excitable automobile (the Autobot known as Bumblebee) behind—and then goes out of its way to make the narrative as unintelligible as possible.

From what I could discern, Sam comes into contact with a shard of the All Spark—the cube that all of the characters spent the previous outing chasing after—which downloads crucial information about the origin of the Transformers into his brain and makes him a fresh target for the Decepticons, led by a newly resurrected Megatron.  After running away from various waves of enemy robots, Sam eventually winds up in Egypt where he has to stop Megatron’s army from activating a machine that blows up the sun.  Or something like that.  Oh, and every now and The Fallen—the villain name-checked in the title—shows up to deliver some vague threat, but consistently avoids getting involved himself.  He’s so lazy and ineffectual, this flick should have been called Revenge of Megatron or, even better, Big Ass Robot Smackdown.

I know, I know—who goes into a Transformers movie expecting a good story, right?  Fair enough, but in that case, why even bother with the human characters?  Why doesn’t Bay just go whole-hog and release a movie that consists of 90-minutes worth of Transformer on Transformer brawls?  Those are the only scenes that the movie’s target audience—teenage boys and adults who still think like teenage boys—cares about anyway…well, that and many, many shots of their current masturbatory object Megan Fox running, jumping and bending over in super slow motion.  (Maybe in this alternate, human-free cut of Transformers Fox could stride around in a barely-there bikini between robot bouts.)  But no, Revenge of the Fallen insists on dragging the proceedings out to an insane two-and-a-half hour length, so that when the film finally ends, the audience doesn’t feel so much elated as beaten into submission.

I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments during Revenge of the Fallen that made me say “Woah…cool!”  A forest fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron is brutally bad-ass and a cameo appearance by the gigantic Decepticon called The Devestator might make your eyes pop, particularly when seen in IMAX (the real thing—not those smaller, faux-IMAX screens Aziz Ansari has been tweeting about).  But the majority of the action sequences are edited so quickly and chaotically, it’s virtually impossible to discern which robot is being reduced to scrap metal or which flesh and blood soldier just got blown up real good.  The only Transformers that do stand apart from the rest of the cannon fodder—and not in a good way—are Mudflap and Skids, who have already correctly been ID’d as the film’s Little Black Sambots.  Sporting crooked metal teeth and talking like refugees from a UPN sitcom, these Autobots are such brazen, breathtaking caricatures, you gotta wonder if Bay has lost his damn fool mind.

Look, I’m not panning Revenge of the Fallen because I think it’ll have an impact on the movie’s bottom line.  In the time its taken you to read this review, the flick has already grossed a gazillion dollars.  All I can do is make a plea to DreamWorks, Paramount and the all-powerful Steven Spielberg to stop Bay before he can produce a movie this overlong and overblown again.  You wouldn’t hand your teenager $200 million with no strings attached and, based on Revenge of the Fallen, the studio shouldn’t have given Bay the same freedom either.

Verdict: Skip It

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Also in Theaters:

The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty
***
Most Iraq War-themed films focus on veterans’ experiences back home following their tours of duty abroad.  Not The Hurt Locker, which takes place almost entirely in Iraq and plays more like an action movie than an emotional drama such as Stop-Loss or Home of the Brave.  Written by embedded journalist Mark Boal, the story follows the exploits of an elite bomb disposal team.  While the film’s episodic structure causes it to drag at times, director Kathryn Bigelow stages some of the most tense and thrilling moments you’re likely to see this year.
Verdict: See It

Afghan Star
Directed by Havana Marking
***
Every nation has its own variation on American Idol, but few come with has much inherent real-world drama as Afghan Star, a talent competition broadcast on one of Afghanistan’s few television stations, Tolo TV.  Havana Marking’s insightful documentary follows four of the competitors vying for the title of Afghan Star, including Rafi, a 19-year-old crooner with matinee-idol good looks, and Setara, one of the show’s few female contestants who causes a major ruckus when she dances along to one of her songs.  (Public dancing is still frowned upon in Afghanistan’s strict Islamic culture.)  While Marking glosses over some of the current realities of life in Afghanistan—you never see American forces patrolling the streets of Kabul, for example—Afghan Star shows how far the country has come since the overthrow of the Taliban…and how far it still has to go.
Verdict: See It

The Stoning of Soraya M.
Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh
Starring Shohreh Aghdashloo, Mozhan Marnò, James Caviezel
**1/2
With all eyes on Iran right now, this dramatization of a real-life incident from that country’s past acquires some unexpected resonance.  In the early ’80s, a young woman in a remote Iranian village was stoned to death after her estranged husband successfully framed her as an adulterer.  The town’s elders attempted to cover up the case, but her aunt was able to recount the story to a foreign journalist who turned it into a best-selling book that serves as the basis for the movie.  The story itself is undeniably tragic and the film is at its best when it simply lets events unfold, building slowly and inevitably to the bloody conclusion.  Unfortunately, director Cyrus Nowrasteh too often lays a heavy hand on top of the proceedings, most notably in the stoning sequence, which is filmed like an outtake from Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.  Nowrasteh has said that he wanted to communicate the full horror of a stoning, but his excessive use of slow-motion at times borders on comical.  The Stoning of Soraya M. tells an important story—it just doesn’t tell it well.
Verdict: Rent It