So... the Transformers movie...

With Michael Bay films, you don't generally have expectations... so much as a mounting sense of dread but then, Hollywood never let a hack director with several critical and financial washouts go without a job - or Paul W.S. Anderson would have starved to death a decade ago - so why not give him something that'll be a hit anyway, eh?

Anyone familiar with the Transformers franchise - in any of its various incarnations - should have been fearful the day they heard Bay was directing... and quite why his name was so heavily promoted is something of a mystery... perhaps it's so people couldn't complain at a later point that they had not been fully apprised of the peril they faced.

As it goes, you'd still think that the basic premise of the franchise is fairly hard to get wrong. You've got a well established cast of characters, all you need to do is put them on Earth and have them slogging it out, good vs. evil... right?

Wrong! At least for Michael Bay, it seems. No... what's more important is the emphasis on teens. Horny, horny teens. Hawny, hawny, hawny, so hawny. Not really, it's the usual - geek meets hottie. Hottie doesn't know geek exists, geek buys car that is actually a giant transforming robot from another planet, geek gets hottie and so on. Let's not forget the soldier who manages to guarantee he survives until the end of the film by talking to his wife and new born. Time was that talk like that would get a man killed.

Anyway, aside from the gritty soldier trying to go see his offspring and the geek doing his best to be Jim from American Pie - there are actually some giant transforming robots in this film... amazingly. Why? Basically, a cubular plot device - the all spark - is what the Autobots and Decpticons were fighting over and it came to Earth a while ago. Megatron came looking for it but crashed in the Artic and with no anti-freeze, was soon incapacitated. Hero geek's great grandfather found Megatron, literally chilling in a glacier and for reasons of plot, his glasses had the position of the allspark transposed onto them.

If that sounds stupid written down, you can only begin to imagine how idiotic it seems when it's put on the screen. Plus a whole subplot about the Decpticons hacking the Internet and having to get the world's most leet hacker to decode their signal... which turns to be nigh on irrelevant.

Really, it's just a horrible mishmash of mediocre teaser action and some laughable excuse for a plot... it's almost like the filler you get in Godzilla films before guys in suits duke it out in Tokyo but a lot more incoherent and cliched. Plenty of forced comedy - which seems to be further liken the Geek to Jim from American Pie - which is more likely to elicit a laugh at its idiocy... or possibly some teeth grinding frustration.

So, eventually after close to two hours of essentially action free tedium, laughable - in the wrong way - attempts at humour, the teen angst/romance and the mandatory secret government agency we get to the money shot... robot on robot action in a city. Quite why the soldiers thought taking the allspark into a populated area was a good idea is never explained but then, this film never pretends to make sense.

The action itself isn't that bad but as you'd expect from a hack director like Bay, there are shaky cameras and fast cuts that should mean this film has a warning for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Many times, there is action which really should be a single continuous shot that either cuts to a different angle or simply goes to see how fast the geek can run. This might be to make sure the effects look more convincing... they are good but there are several moments when you get pulled out the action by the fact that Optimus Prime or Megatron looks like a big blob of CGI.

On the Transformers themselves - the Autobots are more "true" to their original designs but suffice it to say that they've all been horribly reimagined. While it might be into forms that are more practical for very complicated/expensive transformations, they look like a mess... Not nearly as much as the Decpticons though... Most of whom are pretty rubbish looking in their robot state... more an amalgamation of office stationary than deadly killing machines.

All in all, the only things going for this film are the reasonably hot girl and the last 15 minutes - complete with mandatory sequel opening and cheesy use of "more than meets the eye" - which doesn't come even close to stopping this from being a real transforming trainwreck of a movie. Oh, sure fanboys and girls won't leave their seats dry but for anyone with less than fanatical love of the franchise, this will probably be a somewhat subpar action movie/toy commercial.

Really not worth wasting money on - Spielberg and Bay did what they do best. Sucked. A lot.