Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the kind of movie that can drive a person crazy. Its success is completely impervious to its quality. It doesn’t actually have to be good to make the audience walk away saying it was good.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) finds a piece of the All Spark from the first movie in his jacket. Immediately upon seeing it, information is embedded into his brain. From there, it’s a series of explosions and action scenes that I believe are related to that, but I could be mistaken.

Apparently, the symbols Sam starts seeing lead to something called the Matrix of Leadership. At first, the Decepticons are after Sam, so it seems as though that’s what the movie’s about, but then it becomes about the Matrix. If the movie’s about the Matrix, make it clearly about the Matrix, don’t change course halfway through the movie.

 

And why isn’t anyone at all concerned or interested in the piece of All Spark? At the beginning, the Decepticons send a robot to steal it from him, so it’s obviously of some interest to them. But when the robot is captured, do the Decepticons follow up or continue to go after it? No. They just let it go.

At two-and-a-half hours, the movie is too long. You’d think that with all that time they could develop character and story, but they don’t.

At the end of the movie, the characters are pretty much exactly the same as they were at the beginning, and nothing has really been changed or solved in the story.

And the lack of character development is particularly frustrating when it comes to all of the new robots in this movie. They’re all just there, and it’s hard to keep track of who is who and which side they’re on.

 

The only ones who stand out are Skids and Mudflap, but they stand out for the wrong reason — they’re annoying and played as an obvious, horrible African-American stereotype (big ears, bug-eyes, wise-cracking, jive-talking and one of them has a gold tooth).

Rather than take the time to create nuanced characters for these two, they just go with a stereotype. It’s cheap and lazy.

The movie goes for a lot of low-brow humor, which felt out of place to me. A kitchen appliance comes to life and fires rockets from its crotch? A robot in the shape of an airplane farts a parachute? A robot humps Megan Fox’s leg? A robot with two wrecking balls — guess where? None of that needed to be there, it didn’t add anything.

 

However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the audience thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Chances are you already know whether you’ll like the movie or not, and any complaints by people like me won’t change the mind of the general movie-going public.

But I think the first “Transformers” movie was a better popcorn movie.

It’s rated PG-13 for action, language, and crude and sexual material.