When its opening credits note that a film originated as a toy company’s franchise, it makes a professional critic’s blood run cold. Fellini, Bergman, Scorsese? No, the greatness of world cinema has never been traced back to Hasbro.
But then “Transformers” isn’t really a movie.
It’s an eye-popping and often lighthearted computer-generated spectacle with state-of-the-art special effects imagery and a surprisingly entertaining human ensemble. Alas, though, even as it is sure to thrill and tickle mass audiences this holiday week, the overly long and uneven sci-fi action-adventure can’t escape its cheesy lore. About shape-shifting extraterrestrial gizmos with good and evil personas who permeate Earth as boom boxes and hot rods to face off in an ultimate death match, this tinny fantasy eventually succumbs to metal fatigue.
As directed by the king of big loud movie crap, Michael Bay (“Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor”), and written by the team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (“Mission Impossible III”), “Transformers” originated 23 years ago as a boy-toy sensation that eventually spun off into a comic book series and television cartoon. To make today’s blockbuster reinvention of the imaginary characters somehow credible in the literal context of live action, the filmmakers (who also include Steven Spielberg as executive producer) enter the world through the eyes of the flesh-and-blood people who first encounter them.
The always likable Shia LaBeouf plays Sam Witwicky, a geeky 11th-grader made cool to the school hottie (Megan Fox) when his first car, a $4,000 Camaro, turns out to be a disguised automaton from outerspace. Through this sensitive alien called Bumblebee, they are dragged into a cataclysmic escapade: The would-be Chevy and his fellow benevolent Autobots — led by big rig mutation Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) — are trying to stop Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving) and his malevolent Decepticons from getting hold of an omnipotent power source here and destroying our planet.
Whew. You got that?
The hunky Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel play the U.S. military officers who help lead the battle of human support for the Autobots. Jon Voight serves as a distraught secretary of defense. And John Turturro portrays a wild-eyed agent of the secret government organization that has been tracking the Transformers phenomenon for decades.
The seamless conversion of the giant-sized robotsinto and out of their vehicular forms looks astounding. The littler robots morph into cell phones and screech and prattle in a hyper language like R2-D2 on crystal meth. They can be hilariously vicious, somehow communicating an actual personality.
But “Transformers” climaxes in a violent and relentless showdown that only proves one thing: It’s hard to care about lubricated spare parts — no matter how cleverly they have been ratcheted together.
‘Transformers’
3/5 stars
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Jon Voight
Director: Michael Bay
Rated PG-13
