While I personally seem utterly immune to the charms of Michael Bay’s battlebots or anything remotely relating to them, I am, alas, a lousy barometer of mass taste. Indeed, Gregg Killday of The Hollywood Reporter and Variety‘s Pamela McClintock are speaking in terms of past super-hit franchise films, including “Spider-Man 2” and “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” as all signs seem to be pointing to a pretty huge five-day period for the loud epic.
All signs, except reviews, that is. Our own Dave Medsker‘s split decision is, if anything, towards the more positive side of the spectrum of reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has the sequel at a not so good 27%, down 30 points from the more acceptable 57% score the first film received. Indeed, the probably unsurprising amount of critical vituperation exhibited against the 2.5 hour flick is worth noting. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw mirrors my reaction to the first film (the part I made it through, anyway) with his comparison to “watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan.” Roger Ebert might be a gentler soul, but he is little kinder and offers the kind of observations that make his negative reviews such fun to read:
The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although–hello!–you can’t outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: “Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!” The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.
Others, like Luke Y. Thompson — an interesting guy I just had the pleasure of chatting with less than 48 hours back — defend the film as silly fun that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Cinematical’s Todd Gilchrist, though, goes to an entirely different place:
Michael Bay, condensing the cumulative total of the spectacle from all of his seven previous films into one unwieldy, gargantuan opus, has exceeded even the possibilities of sequel-driven “moreness,” combining his own muscular, high-gloss sensibility with the conventions of blockbusters past, present, and probably future to create a monolithic action masterpiece that feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time.
I’m not sure all the words mean exactly what he thinks they mean — I’m still getting my head around “monolithic action masterpiece” (“monolithic”?????) — but I guess the gist is people will be watching. Choose your poison.
