Before we continue, let’s be clear - I’m a big fan of the first Transformers movie. It’s a big, daft, thoroughly enjoyable action movie that nicely balances some very likeable performances with giant space-robots knocking lumps out of each other. It’s good, brainless fun, which is what we all need sometimes. Especially if, like me, you’re also a big fan of the original cartoon series and comics.

Anyway, the original was a barn-storming success at the box-office, making this sequel (and the already-announced third movie) pretty much inevitable. It should have been impossible to cock this up - take the first movie, throw in more transformers, ramp up the action, add a dash of tragedy and some light-hearted moments, wrap in big, shiny ILM ribbon and serve up in a pacy 2-hour package. Bang. Job done, now let’s get on with the third one.

Let’s face it, that would more than have satisfied our robo-cravings for some while. Unfortunately the director, Michael Bay, seems to be the world’s first living brain-donor, having completely excised almost everything that was good about the first movie and inserted a load of cheap, puerile gags (Dogs humping dogs! Robots humping Megan Fox’s leg! Transformer farts! Transformer testicles! Trousers falling down!), borderline soft-porn shots and slow-motion shots that are so over-used that I’m sure they’re the reason the film runs to nearly two-and-a-half hours. Yes, TWO-AND-A-HALF-HOURS of toilet humour and soft-porn, punctuated with the film’s only saving grace: two of the coolest characters ever to grace the silver screen.

Optimus Prime and Bumblebee nearly, very nearly, save this film. Nearly. Whenever they’re on screen, this film flies. Bumblebee’s inability to speak–he uses movie clips and songs to communicate–works wonderfully well, making for a couple of genuinely funny moments. He even gets a couple fo the movie’s big action highlights, one in particular–a scrap with a whip-armed Decepticon and a panther-shaped Decepticon called Rampage–is fantastically realised and brutally ended.

Prime, as ever, gets all the real money-shots though. Two highlights have to be the opening sequence smackdown in Shanghai, where Optimus takes on a huge Decepticon as it rampages through the city and a particularly vicious scrap in a forest where, strongly echoing King Kong’s ‘Kong vs the T-Rexes’ scene, Prime (complete with TWO swords) is pitched against three Decepticons in a limb-rending, tree-smashing battle. Such sequences would be the highlight of any summer blockbuster you care to name, and truly are thrilling to watch.

HOWEVER (and yes those caps are intended, because this is one almighty ‘however’), they cannot, in any way, shape or form, make up for the moronic, lowest-common denominator claptrap that makes up the rest of the movie. From the camera oggling every bit of female flesh that crosses the screen to the ill-judged and, frankly, embarrassing attempts to shoehorn bad taste gags into the script, Bay makes so many missteps, it’s hard to see how the studio though this was fit for release. The script is atrocious, paper-thin and sketching characters in broad, watery brush-strokes, giving them the weakest of motivations and generally sidelining them for as much BOOM BANG KAPOW SMACK LOL IT’S A BUM GAG as possible. Less time with the toilet-humour and more time developing the character arcs would’ve been a wonderful idea.

Even the ever-reliable LeBeouf spends the movie looking embarrassed, stumbling over clunky dialogue and indulging in the kind of tic-riddled pantomime performance that ruined Nicolas Cage’s reputation. After the mediocre quagmires that were Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Eagle Eye, he really needs to put in a decent performance, lest his potential be relegated to being a regular in this kind of dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers nonsense.

One of the real problem’s is that there’s no sense of threat, no real peril. We’re never in any doubt that things won’t all work out. That our intrepid heroes won’t overcome all odds (including finding the daftest McGuffin I’ve seen in a movie for some time). Even the film’s titular bad guy, the Fallen, supposedly the baddest badass ever to badass his way across the universe, is a damp squib of a villain. He never engages the audience, never appears to be anything more than “just another character” and is disposed of so easily it’s incredible.

Even some of the Transformers themselves are a problem this time. One of the best of the new bunch, Sideswipe, is sidelined to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it action scene and a couple of quips; Ratchet and Ironhide are barely used and dozens of Decepticons are thrown into the plot, most so briefly that you’ve no idea who the hell they are. The final scene is swamped with Decepticons (which somehow a couple of knackered Autobots and some humans with pea-shooters manage to hold off – HOW, exactly?) that seem like last-minute additions, just to try and increase the threat. All they actually do is confuse the scene and make you care even less about what’s going on. And don’t get me started on some of the new Transformers such as the hideously underused and disappointing Devastator, the embarrassingly racist Twins and the shockingly unfunny Jetfire (a Transformer so old that he suffers from flatulence and appears to be voiced by an Eastender that insists on cursing every other word because, y’know, cuss-words are cool, right?).

Having said this, Starscream and Megatron are good value, their banter and rivalry from the original cartoon being carried over nicely and working quite well. A brief shining moment in an utter turd of a film then.

Veering wildly from Jock humour to po-faced “the world’s going to end” melodrama (the sort that Megan Fox, a shoe-in for this year’s Razzie), the tone is beyond patchy. Bay can’t decide whether he’s making an action movie, a melodrama or a stupid, childish comedy and falls flat on his face in the middle ground, cocking up everything except the big effects moments–and we can thank ILM for those. Seriously, why is this hack still employed? Action does not have to be brash, fuelled with teenage machismo and devoid of humour or intelligence–see the first two X-Men movies, the last couple of Batman movies or even the Bourne movies for evidence of this.

This fact appears to have bypassed Michael Bay, however; he’s served us up a muddled, ruined, infantile, brash and sexist mess and tried to hide it with a plethora of explosions. It’s probably worth a rental if you’ve enough beer in the house to expunge it from your memory afterwards, but it’s certainly not worth the price of a cinema ticket.

Really, I cannot recommend avoiding this film highly enough.

Jim