For the first five minutes of Transformers — a sound-and-fury tornado of effects that could only entertain during summer’s dumb-dumb dog days — you will believe that bombastic blockbuster director Michael Bay was the right choice to helm the project. Peter Cullen, who has voiced heroic robot Optimus Prime since the original Transformers cartoon of 1984, explains the series’ legacy as his velvet voice establishes this new movie’s driving quest: The search for a hidden cube that is the centerpiece of an age-old war. Geeks will go crazy.

The film’s final 45 minutes lend credence to the notion that Bay deserved the job. Essentially an endless battle between the Autobots (good) and the Decepticons (bad), the conclusion of Transformers raises the bar for summer movie special effects to an unattainable height. Bay and the wizards at Industrial Light & Magic cram so much eye candy into every frame, my corneas have cavities.

But it’s that bloated mid-section of Bay’s overlong extravaganza (clocking in at a punishing 144 minutes) that will test the patience of casual Transformers fans who can’t distinguish Megatron from a Mitsubishi Montero but paid decent money to see stuff get blown up real good. After blasting to life with a military-meets-robotic-might opening, Bay shifts his thriller into neutral and stretches his painfully simple plot to the breaking point in order to bridge a broken second act.

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A film review by Sean O’Connell – Copyright ©2007 filmcritic.com