In fairness, the movie's first hour is pretty zippy, as Sam Witwicky (charismatic Shia LaBeouf) heads East to college, leaving behind parents, girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox), and car (Bumblebee, an Autobot-embedded 1977 Camaro). To Decepticons carefully tracking his every move, Sam is a marked man. He's got what they want so they can destroy the sun - and humanity.
For those not current on the lore behind Transformers, which began their lives as Hasbro toys: Though Sam may look like just an everyboy, to the metal behemoths he holds the key of life. He possesses a sliver of the cosmic sparkplug that is a life force both to the benevolent Autobots and dastardly Decepticons. We are told in the prologue that the adversaries have fought on Earth since paleolithic times.
Unlike the first film, Bay's heavygoing sequel does not strike a balance between tech-loving humans and the anthropomorphic machines. It's diverting enough when envisioning a fanboy fantasyland, considerably less so when it stages World War III. (The warriors are Autobots, allied with U.S. soldiers, fighting Decepticons.)
The fantasyland moments take place in the Witwicky family kitchen where household appliances reveal themselves as pesky Decepticons; at Sam's Ivy League campus, where coeds look like Maxim Hot 100 girls; and on the open highway where sarcastic Sam and saucy Mikaela speed away in Bumblebee, with Decepticons on their tail.
(Considerably less entertaining is a sequence in which Sam has involuntary surgery, a procedure that might be called a colonoscopy of the brain.)
Roughly an hour in, Transformers 2 morphs from teen adventure into lumbering war movie. Bay and his screenwriters squander their human capital in order to show us scenes of 20-ton toys crushing 10-ton toys.
