Action leaves room for little else in ‘Transformers’

In theaters

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, Directed by Michael Bay, written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, 150 minutes, rated PG-13.

Michael Bay has a new movie out, and it’s a crowning achievement — the first English-language film that needs subtitles in order to understand it. It’s called “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” and it’s a shoo-in for the Razzies — Worst Foreign Language Movie in a Non Foreign Language. The film is a masterwork of banality, a champion of stupidity and one of the most over-sold wrecks of the year.

And yes, naturally, it’s the No. 1 movie in America.

Just why it took the top spot is easy to understand — the first film was good. It had a sense of humor, terrific special effects, nice jolts of action, and a story backed by characters we came to know and like. Mirroring that movie, this beauty also clocks in at two and a half hours, but unlike the first film, you feel every stinking minute of it.

What happened along the way? Simple. Whereas the last movie was chaos and fun by way of the machine, this new movie is just chaos driving the machine. It’s such a relentless, over-the-top experience, a movie so determined to best the action in the previous film, that the screen can’t contain any of it, and so it spits it out.

Perhaps the best way to understand the experience of watching the movie is to stand in front of a front-loading washing machine. Pack it full with colorful clothing and press start. Colors will begin to whirl, things will start to spin, you’ll recognize glimpses of what you’ve seen before, and then, if you’ve really overpacked the machine, really stuffed it full, it eventually will go off balance and shake the room until your fillings falls out. The end.

Here is a movie of two parts. On one hand, you can appreciate the special effects for the effort that went into achieving them. On the other hand, those same special effects are part of the problem. Just as the script is a muddy disaster that does nothing to inform the characters with new levels of interest, that muddiness also is reflected in the story line, which goes something like this:

Reprising his role as Sam Witwicky is Shia LaBeouf, who is off to his first year at college when he realizes that etched into his brain are symbols the evil Decepticons need in order to harness a machine in one of Egypt’s pyramids in an effort to destroy the sun and thus all life on Earth.

The Autobots are fully behind Sam, and along with the Sam’s peeps — his love interest Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox), Agent Simmons (John Turturro), Capt. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and Sgt. Epps (Tyrese Gibson) — they all fight the big fight to keep the Decepticons down.

While nobody will accuse the movie of being light on action, action alone isn’t the only ingredient necessary to pull off a successful action movie. There must be a connection to the characters. There has to be a level of cohesion to the story line. Our best action films aren’t those in which you are in awe of only the special effects, but those that also leave you feeling genuine concern for the survival of the characters you’ve come to admire.

On that level, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” fails so spectacularly, it trips itself up from the get-go and it falls flat on its face.

Grade: D

On DVD and Blu-ray disc

KNOWING, directed by Alex Proyas, written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, 122 minutes, rated PG-13.

The Alex Proyas thriller “Knowing” stars Nicolas Cage in one of his better commercial efforts, which is good news for Cage, since he needed a movie that was an improvement over the dreck he has been shucking to audiences lately.

For too long, the man’s career has been one long wallow in the business end of a loaded toilet, where he swam amid such firebombs as “The Wicker Man,” “Ghost Rider,” “Next,” “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” and the especially risible “Bangkok Dangerous.”

What Proyas has done with Cage is to tone him down. The man still is as gaunt as ever (would somebody please throw him a Fat Burger?), but gone are the massive fright wigs he has favored as of late, not to mention his thirst for delivering such hilarious, over-reaching performances, they tend to lend themselves to drinking games.

“Knowing” is a B-movie movie about the end of the world and how one young girl named Lucinda (Lara Robinson) saw it coming 50 years ago.

At the start of the film, this grim girl with the dead eyes and the blank face taps into something otherworldly when she joins the rest of her class by drawing her idea of what the future will look like within 50 years. Instead of drawing happy little space ships, Lucinda goes crazy in the classroom, scribbling down a rush of numbers on a piece of paper that gets tucked in a time capsule.

Cut to the present and Cage’s John Koestler, a widower doing his best to raise his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) while spending quality time with a whisky bottle. It’s when the time capsule is opened and Caleb comes in contact with Lucinda’s handiwork that their lives are turned sideways, with John, an astrophysicist at MIT, soon realizing that the numbers Lucinda wrote correlate with the dates and locations of worldwide disasters, such as Sept. 11.

The list states that the next day, 81 people will die, which indeed happens when a plane crashes near John in New York City. A few days later, a subway train skips the tracks and smashes through crowds of people, killing the exact number Lucinda predicted. Each of these scenes are beautifully handled, so seamless in their special effects, they add a nice rush to the movie.

Deepening the film’s creepy factor are the men in black who hover around Caleb like a clutch of crows. They’re known as the “Whisperers” and they appear mostly at night, standing watch over Caleb in ways that suggest a malicious intent. Draw into this story a subplot that involves Lucinda’s daughter, Diana (Rose Byrne) and her daughter, Abby (Robinson), who also can hear the Whisperers, and “Knowing” becomes a satisfying thriller that doesn’t cheat its audience when it comes to its harrowing ending.

Grade: B

WeekinRewind.com is the site for Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s blog, DVD giveaways and movie reviews. Smith’s reviews appear Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.