The Thing About Transformers Is, You Don't Have To Choose Between A Car Chase Or A Robot Fight, Because The Cars ARE Robots

I saw Transformers with my Pa the other day. I walked into the theater with high expectations (the Strib doesn't just hand out four-star reviews, you know [and unlike John Hansen's four-star selections, I usually enjoy the Strib's), and I gotta say: they were fulfilled.

In a movie with this many sweet robots, all the actors really have to do is meet a few basic requirements:

Our hero, Shiite LaBouferino or some such nonsense, was an acceptably underdog (and yet not too uncool) protagonist--check.

The dad stayed out of the way, and the mom was unexpectedly hilarious--check plus.

His love interest was a hot babe who managed to pose provocatively by a car hood for about six minutes straight--check.The army dudes were heroic-ish and said badass stuff like "Bring the rain!"--check.

John Voight brought a commanding screen presence to his role as some government guy, while reminding me of a pudgy Christopher Walken--check plus.The hacker subplot was kind of unnecessary, and the female analyst was deadly dull, but the black hacker dude was sweet ("Lemme work my magic!")--check minus.

John Turturro got peed on-excuse me, had coolant drained onto him-by a robot--check plus plus.


Now that that's out of the way: man, those robots were sweet. Not only did they look great (I'm sure the money spent on CG could have fed the entire continent of Africa for about a week), they had ATTITUDE. Plenty of movies have sweet robots--how many have sweet robot banter?Plus, they were all GM products. Clearly, alien robots know quality technology when they see it.

Final review: better than Armageddon, not as good as Independence Day. Man, now I'm just imagining how much better Transformers could have been with Will Smith in it.

Look at that soulful son of a bitch

There would have been no need for him to replace any of the other characters. He could have just parachuted in during the finale and punched out Megatron himself. But he'd have to have just said (pluskwam perfekt mit Sub II, oh snap) something like "Boo-yah! or "Ya heard?!?" or "Wasssup?!?" first.