Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review

Remember when you used to watch the Transformers cartoon and it had really crappy dialogue, bad voiceovers and a weak, thin story line?  And you watched it anyways because it was about an alien race of robots that could turn into cool stuff?  Let's just say that Revenge of the Fallen is very true to the original cartoons.  We watch both for the cool fighting robots and begrudgingly put up with the crap like the overly melodramatic lines spoken by all of the robots and most of the humans.  With the exception of it having really cool effects and destruction and carnage galore, it is a terrible movie.  I will now give you my reasons for that judgment.

Most of the new characters are junk.  The new twin Autobots are borderline racist and Wheelie, the RC Truck Decepticon is nothing but a ripoff of Futurama's Roberto.  Sam's roommate is annoying and extraneous; sort of like your appendix.  You want to pre-emptively get rid of him in case he makes things worse.  We could easily have reintroduced John Turturro without his help.  And they should have brought him back sooner.  The story doesn't progress with any pace until he makes his first appearance.

It raises too many logic questions and new revelations that really distract you from enjoying the movie.  Why would the twins take the form of a shitty ice cream truck?  Why would they have to wait until the military provided new cars to take the form of rather than just drive past something cool like Bumblebee did (I know GM wanted to promote their last-ditch effort cars that nobody would buy but that was just sad)?  Since when can a Decepticon take a seemingly human form?  Why is the SR-71 a flatulent, old, British crank?  Touching the shard gives Sam all of this knowledge now?  Why not when he first held the whole cube?  The roommate has a conspiracy theory empire and didn't know the government could track him via his cell phone? Puh-lease!

Michael Bay shamelessly promotes his old movies again.  It's almost like he knows Revenge of the Fallen is so bad so he doesn't want us to forget some of the other stuff he's done and judge him solely on this.

It's too long.  eg. We don't need to see Sam's mom wig out on pot brownies.  Sad attempt at comic relief that didn't further the plot at all.  In fact, all of the attempts at comic relief (with the exception of Turturro) are lame and cheesy and most could have been cut.  Michael Bay, I challenge you to cut out the crap.  Remove the half hearted attempts at comic relief, spend some time writing a good story, whittle about 30 minutes of all of the junk and make a movie that will not make me leave my childhood behind for good.

Don't see it.  It's confusing, mostly boring and worse than the first (another I said not to see).