Bad Toys II

[July 4th, 2007]

If it offers the world nothing else, Transformers is proof that Michael Bay is a lot like beer.

After sitting through the grandiose, insipid spectacle Bay has wrought, I can offer devotees of 1980s merchandise-hawking cartoons the assurance that Hasbro found the right man for the job. Their cherished memories of Optimus Prime and Ironhide are safe in the hands of the individual who brought the world Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II. Another director might have considered a story of intergalactic battling robots that turn into cars and decided to approach it as camp—the sort of insincerity that laughs at itself before you can laugh at it. But Bay is not that director. He has the audacity to look Optimus square in his laser-beam eyes and make a sincere movie.

Is it a good movie? By Unicron, no. Transformers ranks among the stupidest movies I have ever seen. But it has the courage of its own badness. And for a while, that moxie is enough.

Exactly what kind of idiocy Bay is delivering becomes clear when the opening sequence—in deep space, "before time began"—cuts to present-day Qatar (helpfully identified, by repeated subtitle, as "Qatar—The Middle East"). There, a group of U.S. soldiers is assaulted by a big ol' helicopter that turns into a weapon of mass destruction. Cut to a feckless student named Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) delivering a history presentation on his polar-exploring grandfather. Cut to the Arctic, and Grandpa Witwicky chopping away at the ice to reveal...Megatron!

Once you realize that Transformers is the sort of project that cannot mention the Arctic without immediately going to the Arctic, a sort of giddy acceptance washes over the rest of your experience. It doesn't matter that the Autobots and the Decepticons—metallic jumbles of shapes that never quite coalesce into recognizable figures—look like they were designed by Frank Gehry. It doesn't matter that the relationship between Sam and his Camaro-cum-alien Bumblebee borrows liberally from the plot of E.T. It doesn't matter that the only characters with recognizably human personalities are in fact machines. None of it matters, because Transformers is a movie that offers the twin pleasures of laughing at Bay's turgid filmmaking and gasping at his unprecedented effects. Until it doesn't.

And here we reach the crucial Bay/beer analogy. Because watching Transformers is a lot like drinking alcohol while enjoying a game like darts or bowling. For a time, you find that the inebriation actually improves your play. And then you hit that moment universally known as the Beer Curve, and your aim—along with everything else—starts to wobble. The fun of Transformers, which increases the more mindless it gets, hits the same wall once you realize that every imaginable curiosity has been thrown at the screen, and there's still another 30 minutes of kinetic aerial battling left to endure. This is the Michael Bay Curve, and while I can't stop you from trying it for yourself, I can warn you that it's going to make you nauseous.