For years I’ve been a Bay apologist, loving Armageddon and The Rock, even enjoying The Island. But this feels like the work of a director suffering from early onset dementia, or at least a very specialized form of infantilism. For the audience it’s like being repeatedly hit over the head with something very shiny and very loud, for well over two hours.
I’m not sure what I was expecting- this is a movie made to sell toys and vehicles in roughly equal measure, and doesn’t attempt to disguise it’s omnipresent product placement. I just don’t think art and commerce have to be quite so mutually exclusive- there’s a decent action movie here trying to get out, and for a few scenes, mostly in the first half, it just about manages to. But the ending is just a hopeless muddle, there’s no way to tell what’s even going on half the time, characters appear and disappear, things blow up for no apparent reason, and it all started to give me a headache.
by Tom Huddleston | Source: 35mm print
30 Aug 2007 12:39 PM | Submit Comment
