Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

Deep down inside, I feel that not enough has been written about Transformers or how much everybody hates its director, Michael Bay. Saying you hate Michael Bay is about as original as saying Michael Jackson is slightly weird. But the truth about Bay's films is that they are nearly impossible to take your eyes off of, not always for the right reasons. But you watch them with a sense of "Well, I've never seen that before." TRANSFORMERS is the perfect fit for Bay's brand of ultra-slick action film, where character development doesn't just take a back seat to the special effects and rapid-fire editing; it's actually dragged along behind the movie like a dead carcass. But unlike Bay's previous films (THE ROCK; ARMAGEDDON; PEARL HARBOR; THE ISLAND and the BAD BOYS films) where a little more investment in the characters might have actually made a difference, TRANSFORMERS doesn't require such depths. These alien robots were introduced as toys and a cartoon series, so to pile on motivation and anything beyond a surface-level mythology would be foolish and unnecessary.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit I have zero history with any incarnation of the Transformers, but I'm guessing that didn't really make any difference in my evaluation of the film. There are several converging stories happening here. A group of military types in the Middle East are attacked by a helicopter that turns into a robot. Nearly all of the men are killed, except for a small group (which includes Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson) that escapes into the desert. A teenage boy named Sam (Shia LaBeouf) goes out with his dad to buy his first car. For reasons that become clear later in the story, the car ends up picking him. And somewhere on earth, is a giant mechanized cube (known as the Allspark) that is of great value to two armies of robots from the planet Cybertron. And that's pretty much all you need to know going in.

Of course, Sam's car turns out to be one of the good guy robots (known as Autobots, led by Optimus Prime), who are protecting him from the Decepticons, a fearsome (and much cooler, in my estimation) group of 'bots bent on finding the Allspark and using it for their evil purposes. Sam's long-dead ancestor discovered a century ago the location of the Allspark on earth and imprinted the information on his glasses, which Sam just happens to have. After the attack on the military base, the government (headed by Secretary of Defense Keller, played by Jon Voight) enlists the help of the world's top computer hackers to discover exactly that the nature of the attack was and to help counter a virus that was injected into the world's computers during the attack.

The rest of the film is one spectacular battle sequence after another, interrupted by lame jokes and dozens of underdeveloped characters. Now I know I said that character development isn't important in a film like TRANSFORMERS, but there are entire groups of characters introduced who do absolutely nothing in this film. Let's take for example the introduction of Anthony Anderson into the mix. I like Anderson as an actor, but he's brought in kind of late in the film as the only hacker in the world who can figure out the meaning of a mysterious signal that the Decepticons sent out during an attack. But to get to that point, we have to go through a painful introduction to his character that is meant to be funny but just ends up being dumb and time consuming. While we're on the subject of hackers, an entire group of them is brought in at one point and they just kind of sit there, with the exception of this smoking-hot Australian chick. Hmmm, I wonder why Bay picked her? Similar wastes of time can be found in comedy attempts involving Sam's parents. Twenty minutes could have easily been trimmed from this bloated work, and you wouldn't have even noticed it.

But ultimately TRANSFORMERS lives or dies on the strength of its title characters, who really and truly blew me away. I was so busy trying to examine the complexities of their constantly shifting and moving design work, that I barely remember what they said. I can say without a hint of blowing things out of proportion or overstating my case that you have never seen anything like the special effects in TRANSFORMERS. I can fault the film on many levels, but not on the craftsmanship that went into designing and bringing to robotic life these astonishing creatures. And the effects magic doesn't stop there. The battle scenes are tremendous. Cars and trucks and tanks and helicopters are tossed all over the place, and each vehicle is given a weight and destructive power when it lands and rips up the street or ground beneath it. And I never really got tired of watching the robots transform from whatever vehicle they were pretending to be. One of the film's big mysteries is the location of Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons. I won't ruin that surprise, but his reveal is pretty great, and the film's destructive splendor is tripled when he arrives.

It's hardly worth mentioning the human actors in the movie, but I will single out Shia LaBeouf for breathing some much-needed life into the proceedings. He fulfills every geek fantasy about becoming a hero while the fate of the earth is at stake. But more than that his reactions to being amongst these incredible Autobots are genuine. Of course, he would be struck dumb; who wouldn't be? He has a wild crush on a classmate (the ridiculously stunning Megan Fox, who, up to know, has mostly done TV work), who ends up becoming his partner in fighting against the Decepticons. And even that storyline kind of works. I should also mention the almost surreal and very welcome presence of John Turturro as Agent Simmons of the super-secret Sector 7 agency. He knows he's in a Michael Bay movie. It's as if he studied Bay's works and came up with ways to stand out amongst all the insanity around him. His performance is so over the top that he makes a far more effective comic relief vehicle than anyone else in the film, plus his character actually does something, which makes him indispensable to the movie.

I'm not one of those people who recommend anyone switch off their brain during the summer movie season; I just don't believe you need to pretend to be an idiot to enjoy any movie. But finally acknowledging that TRANSFORMERS is a big, dumb, entertaining flick went a long way toward me actually enjoying most of what I was watching. Even die-hard Bay detractors are going to have a hard time denying the good time they have watching TRANSFORMERS.

Capone
capone@aintitcool.com