Shia LaBeouf was smart and winning as Sam Witwicky, the California teen who learns that a Camaro is more than a car - it's a machine with transformative powers that, if properly deployed, can get you a girl like Megan Fox.
The Camaro is back (along with a half-dozen other GM models) but Bay's budding story sense has completely vanished, or given way to his famous love of the bombastic: Anyone who shells out $10 for "Transformers 2" should be reimbursed under the new "cash for clunkers" program.
It's too long, it's too loud, it's full of stuff you've seen before, it's polluted with product placement (more corporate logos than a NASCAR jumpsuit), and full of pompous Hollywood self-regard (Bay plugs his own lousy movies).
And, on top of everything else, it's borderline racist. There are a couple of Chevy Aveos that transform into buck-toothed, shuckin' and jivin' hip-hop autobots that call each other "bitch" and are assigned lines like "We don't do much readin'." Whoa. These guys make "Star Wars' "Jar Jar Binks look cosmopolitan.
LaBeouf returns as Sam, this time off to college, separating (at least geographically) from his girlfriend (Fox), his parents, and the good-robot autobots, which are still fighting bad robot deceptacons popping up around the globe looking for a secret energy source that can fuel a bad-robot revolution and the destruction of Earth (ho-hum, another apocalypse).
Among the villains are government bureaucrats who want to mothball the good robots because they've outlived their usefulness - this is idiotic, since the first 20 minutes are given over to the destruction of Shanghai via a bad-robot eruption.
Just one example of the rampant nonsense, which Bay either ignores or treats as a joke - the movie does have a sense of humor, and at least one actor (can't say who) returns from the original in the right frame of mind to have fun with the goofy script.
