Battery Is All That’s Included

I’ve made no bones about liking Michael Bay movies. So much so, in fact, that I wouldn’t even deign to consider them guilty pleasures simply because that would be too denigrating. They’re certainly not going to be mistaken for the films of Kubrick or Hitchcock or Powell & Pressburger, but that’s no bad thing.

Between watching acerbic comedies, poignant dramas, labyrinthine thrillers and hardcore pornography there are times when I’m happy to sit back and watch guys running around and blowing shit up on a massive scale, probably because it takes me back to when I was a little kiddie, taken to see Where Eagles Dare at The Savoy cinema in Exmouth not once but twice. And Bay really knows how to point a camera at shit blowing up on a massive scale really well.

Of course there’s a little bit more to it than that. Most of the films have quite a nice vein of humour running through them so that they never always take themselves too seriously, which makes them far better than James Cameron’s more po–faced boys–with–their–toys movies. But really it’s all about finding a really cool location and then letting the mayhem begin. Of course it doesn’t mean that all of Bay’s films work. On the existing evidence he really shouldn’t do historical epics that incorporate a seriously grating love story, and he really, really, shouldn’t do sequels.

Bad Boys, his first feature, was a lean and energetic cop buddy–movie. Eight years later, the belated sequel – which might have seemed a safer bet after the critical pasting unleashed upon Pearl Harbor – was a bloated and humourless mess that could have done with close to an hour chopped from the almost two–and–a–half hours running time. The same has happened with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Although only a couple of minutes longer that the first movie it felt like it went on for much, much longer.


I quite liked the first Transformers film. When the whole “Robots in Disguise” craze first hit in the mid–1980s I was well past the age of pissing around with plastic toys or watching crappy cartoons. I can’t say I felt at all left out, which meant that when the movie was announced I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. How do you take alien robots beating the cogs off each other seriously? Obviously the answer was you don’t so while the Autobots and Decepticons bash each other about the humans skitter around providing the comic relief.

The sequel just didn’t manage to find the same balance. Like most follow–ups, because the characters are already established and, in this instance, the robots already outed, there’s very little for them to do other than go through the motions. Stretching an already thin story, regularly punctuated by robot smackdowns, well beyond its breaking point, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was like an endurance test that I barely managed to get to the end of.

Just past the first hour I figured that the film was almost at the end and was astonished to look at the timer and see that it wasn’t even at the midway point. By the time the credits rolled I was so worn down that I couldn’t remember what had happened at the beginning so didn’t know if it had reached a satisfying conclusion.

And now Michael bay is preparing to make a third Transformers film. I’d never have thought he could be mistaken for Woody Allen’s Sandy Bates from Stardust Memories, but if he carries on like this soon I’ll look back at his work and declare that I prefer his “earlier, funnier movies.”