As it turns out, Michael Bay officially peaked with The Island (his one film I greatly enjoyed). For the record, I REALLY wanted to like this movie. But boy oh boy, is it a flawed movie. Strangely, it’s not the Transformers fanboy from my childhood that had problems with the film. While they’re a bit toned down in presence of personality, particularly the Decepticons, there was enough original style character material to make it work. Things like the movie opening with Peter Cullen’s booming Optimus Prime voice are enough to give fans a chill. But even still, many aspects of this film fall on their face, completely. For one thing, the humor is almost a complete misfire. For every joke that works (all three or four of them), there are 99 that don’t. So, what does work? Everything that involved the fine folks at ILM (and the other VFX houses that took up the slack). All the big action scenes work very well, just on coolness factor alone. I had hoped that this film could tap into that same over-the-top, large scaled energy that Independence Day pulled off, but it only works in parts. For one thing, does Michael Bay just keep pushing his cast to go more and more manic in everything they do? I mean he has a number of talented actors in this film, all of whom seem like they are blithering imbeciles. Everyone except Josh Duhamel & Tyrese Gibson, that is. Honestly, I would have completely loved this movie if it were completely centered around the Autobots, Decepticons and the special forces soldiers. The “Sector Seven” stuff, on the other hand, was terrible. Even John Turturro falls flat on his face as the lead Sector Seven agent, which doesn’t help matters. For it’s handful of over-the-top flaws, Live Free or Die Hard was a far more entertaining summer action film. If you wanna go see a fantastic film released in the last week that is multiple times better than this film, go see Ratatouille. If you’re a huge sci-fi action buff, I’ll concede that it is worth seeing just for a few sequences earlier in the film and the final reel.

Writing: Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, what the heck happened, guys? These two writers have turned out some excellent work in the past, often for JJ Abrams (including the upcoming Trek XI), but this one just ain’t up to snuff. Perhaps Michael Bay really drove the script into the ground with his incessant desire to bring everything to an unbearably manic level. I have to assume that the original script worked better than what made it to the screen. While I’m perfectly happy to go with major leaps of reality and logic for a popcorn action movie of the genre, I just can’t overlook such horrible attempts at being cute and humorous, with incredibly stilted dialog. And the manufactured sentimentality is in no way correctly earned. To face the fact that an animated movie from 20 years ago was written 10 times better than this mega-budget film is a pretty sad fact.

Production: This is the one aspect of the film that works. There’s no denying that the final reel of the film is something to behold. There’s a handful of sequences earlier in the film that are no small accomplishment, either. From the cool transformation work to the synapse-frying battle sequences, the wizards at ILM are clearly working in overdrive. It’s this last reel of the film that finally hits the marks that I was hoping for with the film, but ultimately it’s a bit too little too late. They save up all the best stuff for that last reel and pepper in the good material before hand, then they try to be cute, funny and crazy in between and everything falls apart. Did I mention how much better this film would have been if it had been completely centered around Duhamel & Gibson’s special forces world?

Cast: Nearly all the cast are left with egg on their faces. Hopefully, this film will be written off as completely summer popcorn fun and not leave a black mark on their acting reel. If I were one of most any of the cast in this film, I wouldn’t put any trust in working for Michael Bay again. Most of them come off as little more than complete buffoons. Again, I’ll single out Duhamel & Gibson as a successful element. And, while her primary purpose in the film may be to look hot, Megan Fox does manage to make her character work and escape that trap of goofy mania that most of the cast get trapped in. Shia LaBeouf, who I normally like in most roles, suffers heavily from what most of the others in the cast suffer from in this film - completely misdirected manic energy that makes most all their scenes feel ridiculous and stupid. The most intolerable are Kevin Dunn and Julie White as the parents. Actually, Julie White is pretty much a complete misfire. Her performance is flat out awful. And they proceed to feature her in little end credit bits, almost as a form of torture for those like me who stick through the end credits (not to mention torturing us during said credits with awful songs). Then you’ve got Bernie Mac & Anthony Anderson both bringing out the worst elements of their manic nature. John Turturro is so goofball and artificial that it’s hard to not laugh at his performance for all the wrong reasons. Poor Jon Voight seems to be trying to make his character work, but never quite pulls it off. And don’t even get me started on the whole technological aspects with regard to the hacking, etc. Heck, I’ll forgive that bit, since all movies do a terrible job at all that stuff, and the far superior Independence Day was one of the single biggest offenders. But hey, the tech aspect of the movie did have one great bit - casting Tom Lenk in a minor role. The Buffy fan in me did a little “woo hoo!” when I saw him on screen. I had read quite some time ago that he had a small role, but had completely forgotten about it.

Music: Steve Jablonsky, who can turn out some great scores when he wants to, completely phones this one in. This is an action score. It is nothing more than a cookie cutter action score. As far as I noticed, it was in no way original and was in every way as generically “modern action blockbuster” as it could be. Gone are the inventive flourishes he used for The Island. Nowhere to be found are the lush orchestrations and thrilling action scoring he used for Steamboy (which is admittedly a horrible movie). For those film score fans who don’t like the more generic aspects of Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions stable of composers, they will hate this score. To continue the comparisons to big July 4 sci-fi action epics like Independence Day, Jablonsky’s score isn’t worthy of licking the boots of David Arnold’s masterpiece Independence Day score.