Transformers

Pop quiz: what movie unites the late, great Orson Welles, Mr Spock, our very own Eric Idle, Hart to Hart's Lionel Stander, and Judd Nelson from The Breakfast Club?

If you answered Transformers - the Movie you go to the top of the class. Released at the height of the transfomers' craze in 1986, this modest animated spin off from a short-lived TV series was a box office dud pretty much everywhere.

Two decades later, the versatile robo-toys are enjoying renewed popularity with fresh product lines and a series of gaming adventures. US manufacturer Hasbro joins forces with Steven Spielberg's ailing Dreamworks company to give the movie another shot, this time mixing live action with CGI effects. Spielberg offers the gig to director Michael Bay, who is initially offended, but reconsiders when his big budget sci-fi The Island bombs.

Spielberg and co press Bay to cast Shia Labeouf as teen hero Sam Witwicky. With Dreamworks' Disturbia in the can and a part lined up in the new Indiana Jones movie, Labeouf is being groomed as the studio's house star. He's a young Richard Dreyfuss type circa American Grafitti, and a good actor to boot. At 20 Labeouf is mature for a teenager, but then the Armageddon director doesn't really want to pitch this at children - that's not his style. He casts FHM model Megan Fox as Sam's high school heartthrob and figures he'll concentrate his energies on the action sequences. Hardware he can handle - and so what if this loud, long, hyper-inflated toy advertisement often feels more like a prolonged promo for GM cars and the US military? In Bay's mercenary world it's every kid for himself.

In case you're too old, or (as I prefer to imagine) too cool, the Transformers are sentient machines from Outer Space. To pass undetected on Earth they assume the form of everyday consumer objects - mostly, here, American trucks and autos - but in their true configuration they are colossal robot warriors with the firepower to match. The Autobots are the good guys, led by sanctimonious Optimus Prime. Then there are the evil Decepticons, led by Megatron, whose role is basically to blow stuff up. Not that you can tell them apart, really.

Despite their name, the Decepticons show themselves first, with a devastating (and oh-so-zeitgeisty) strike on a US military base in Qatar. It's not the massacre of the troops that troubles the Pentagon so much as a stealth hack attack on their computer network. Could the Iranians have developed such cyber smarts? Where's John McClane when you need him?

Meanwhile, back in Lalaland, high school geek Sam Witwicky is the befuddled new owner of a beaten up yellow Camaro with a matchmaking streak. Like a certain VW love bug, the car starts and stalls at will, and likes to pre-select golden oldies as romantic cues. It's only when Sam sees it steal itself one night and transform into an Autobot named Bumblebee that he realizes this must be more than a quirky optional extra.

The bone-crunching action suggests Bay imagines he's remaking War Of The Worlds, or maybe Terminator 4. And to be fair, the Transformers in motion are something to see - even in a high velocity blur, they're surprisingly graceful. As with several of this year's event pictures, the effects guys have surpassed themselves. But the illusion is shattered whenever the 'bots start talking - I never thought I'd find myself yearning for the wit and sophistication of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you live and learn.

Bay tries to gloss over the infantile plot, but it would take a lighter, sharper touch to square the movie's pedestrian and frequently lame script with its excitable vision of impending auto-geddon. Where's Joe Dante (Gremlins) when you need him?

Just look at how a supposedly tense scene with Sam retrieving a crucial talisman for the future of the planet dissolves into embarrassing adolescent humor ('Were you masturbating?' mom wants to know) and banal suburban angst (the Autobots clumsily trample dad's lawn). I guess that reminds us who the movie's target audience is, but how such juvenilia has gone on to gross more than $220 million at the US box office is beyond me. As to why such high-tech machines need to get hold of a pair of antique spectacles is apparently neither here nor there.

Other questions that bothered me: why does the 'Allspark' only create Decepticons? What happened to Scorponok? How does Bumblebee get his voice back? Why on earth do the good guys head for a densely populated city to stage the showdown? Why is Anthony Anderson in this movie? Did Michael Bay ever meet a woman with an IQ above 50? And what are they putting in American popcorn these days anyway?

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com