I am convinced there is more to director Michael Bay than simply a high-school quarterback strutting through the changing room in a wet towel. On those rare occasions he has been entrusted with a piece of good writing – The Rock being the best example – he has proved he can deliver visually arresting, adrenaline-fuelled entertainment from the top drawer. He also has a knack of being nerve-janglingly sentimental. When William Fitchner’s astronaut asks Liv Tyler if he can ‘shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man I’ve ever met’ at the end of Armageddon, I blub uncontrollably every time. There is no denying he has a fetishistic visual sensibility and is only too happy to leer at both machinery and his attractive, grime-smeared actors as if they were Vegas pole dancers or generous cuts at the deli counter, but since James Cameron disappeared after Titanic, Bay is left peerless as the king of the hi-tech, chest-beating summer movie spectacle.

That said, the man provokes an almost unparalleled degree of vitriolic loathing in critics and fan boys. In some respects it is easy to see why the press have a hard time taking him seriously. With a résumé that includes the woeful Pearl Harbor, the half-baked The Island and now two Transformers movies, Bay has too often submitted vacuous, sledgehammer entertainment so boisterously negligent of the subtleties of the art form it can often feel like being smacked repeatedly in the face with a pot lid. These films are easy to dismiss and make him fair game for abuse and ridicule. But one day, Michael Bay will direct a masterpiece. He will find a script that perfectly complements his trademark aesthetic of sunsets, car wax and slow-mo explosions to create the ultimate example of escapist cinema that will bring the world to its knees before him. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, however, is not that film. It is a film of grand scope, yet microscopic vision, a film long and loud, yet with nothing to say. It visits some of the most beautiful places on earth only to demand its audience watches computer-generated robots hit each other, and indulges in ill-judged comedic repartee often cringe worthy rather than amusing.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) heads off to college, implausibly leaving his girlfriend, Mikaela (Megan Fox), back home to paint motorbikes in cut-off jeans. He discovers a shard of the All Spark, the powerful alien cube that had everyone so excited in the first film, which causes him to hallucinate, babble incoherently and scrawl unintelligible symbols and hieroglyphs all over his books and dorm room walls. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime and the Autobots continue their clean-up mission, ridding earth of rogue Decepticons with the help of a human tactical unit called NEST. When the Decepticons learn of the surviving All Spark splinter, they chase Sam down, determined to retrieve the information, now buried inside his head, that could help them conquer the planet.

All of this is largely irrelevant, of course, and merely an excuse for an inordinate number of high-velocity set pieces, which are noisy, often incoherent and cause plentiful collateral damage. But when even a scene of Sam’s parents carrying boxes into a building is filmed like it’s the Indy 500, what technically qualifies as an action sequence and what doesn’t? The story shifts, almost completely without explanation, from Shanghai to LA to Paris to Washington DC to Petra to Cairo, but when you are Michael Bay and you’ve got money to burn, you don’t need a reason.

The major players from the original movie all return to get smacked around, shouted at and stare in awe at stuff to be digitally added later, while the camera spins frantically around them. Shia LaBeouf continues his ascent into Hollywood’s A-list. He is a fallible, likeable screen presence and effortlessly combines smarts, charm and a goofy, disarming disposition that should secure him a place on our screens for decades to come. His co-star, Megan Fox, while enjoying ‘Sexiest Woman on the Planet’ status right now and (un)favourable comparisons to Angelina Jolie, has a less certain future. While there is no denying the pleasant experience of seeing her smeared in sweat and sand on a 40-ft high IMAX screen, she has yet to prove a bona-fide actress. Legendary character actor John Turturro also returns, surely motivated as much financially as by wishing for once to make a film his kids might want to see.

I am in no doubt of the huge global demand for another Transformers movie. I had a number of the toys as a child, was an avid watcher of the cartoon, I read the comics and couldn’t get enough of Stan Bush’s The Touch. I even enjoyed parts of Michael Bay’s first movie, although it sadly suffered from many of the same flaws. The problem lies in convincing anybody that this is the Transformers movie they wanted to see. What is up on screen is a rampaging, out-of-control leviathan, designed to engulf the planet and hoover up as much cash as possible, much like the character Devastator at the film’s climax. It may occasionally look attractive during its sparkling IMAX moments, but it lacks anything approaching a heart or soul and never threatens to be more than meets the eye.
James Marsh