'Tis the season for mindless entertainment designed to keep a wide cross section of the movie-going public out of the summer heat. Considered from that perspective, Transformers (Dreamworks/Paramount) can be considered a success.
The many moving parts cannibalized from Hasbro's shape-shifting robot toys and their TV cartoon spin-off add up to a shrewdly engineered whole with blockbuster emblazoned on its forehead. Transformers has heart-pounding action, portentous comic-book themes, tongue-in-cheek pop culture references and a charismatic lead, Shia LaBeouf, whose star is on the rise.
Regrettably, many of the stabs at humor are too edgy for children and teens. The excessive amount of crude material, which acts as filler between the explosions and chases, is particularly unfortunate because the film's target audience stretches from the 6-year-olds who currently play with the toys to the thirtysomething adults that made them popular in the 1980s.
On the nearly two-and-a-half-hour ride, teenager Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) finds himself caught in a battle between two factions of alien robots — the Autobots and the Decepticons — in search of a lost object, The Cube, vital to their civilization.
Sam's explorer great-grandfather made a relevant discovery decades earlier at the North Pole, which is why Sam is now wanted by both sets of machines, which manifest themselves as American-made cars and trucks.
Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), leader of the benevolent Autobots, dispatches a Transformer taking the shape of a rusty yellow Camaro to protect Sam. Bumblebee (voice of Mark Ryan) becomes Sam's first car and their bond is the movie's emotional glue.
With the Autobots and Decepticons racing to locate information Sam unknowingly possesses, various parties are swept up in the conflict: American soldiers (Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel), the US Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight), a secret federal agency concerned with extraterrestrials, and Mikaela (Megan Fox), a scantily clad girl from Sam's high-school class.
Needless to say, the fate of planet earth, mankind and possibly the entire universe hangs in the balance.
Director Michael Bay (Armageddon, The Rock) is not a critical favorite, but he's evidently learned a few things from his executive producer on this project, Steven Spielberg.
Diehard Transformers fans may not appreciate that Sam outshines the robot heroes, who are difficult to distinguish from one another, particularly during the blurry final battle on the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Yet giving primacy to people and human emotions is one example of Spielberg's thumbprint.
In accord with the movie's humanistic, Spielbergian notes, the Transformer mythology developed by screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman is grounded in familiar motifs such as "power can be used for both good and evil" and "no sacrifice, no victory," the Witwicky family motto.
These themes also offset Bay's tendency to fetishize weaponry and military hardware. The movie's cartoonlike violence, in which countless people are put in harm's way without being felled, is not problematic.
Transformers is studded with off-color references and material, most concerning Sam's hormonal passage through late adolescence, that can't be ignored, however. Parents shouldn't assume they'll go over the heads of toddlers, tweens and teens.
From an artistic standpoint, a summertime diversion like Transformers gets a pass for being lumbering and superficial, but not for its propensity to aim for the lowest common denominator.
The film contains many sexual references, some crude language, a vulgar gesture, disrespectful racial jokes, drug references and some moderately violent action sequences. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
