Aggression is a good thing in comedy. From Charlie Chaplin to Ace Ventura, comic heroes have often been thrusting, assertive types, forever trying to gain some advantage over the other fellow; comedy is basically cruel (recall Mel Brooks’ famous adage: “Tragedy is when I stub my toe; comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die”), precisely because it’s played for laughs. Aggression, on the other hand, isn’t always a good thing in action movies. The genre is aggressive in itself, so it goes best with a certain nonchalance, the recessive cool of Steve McQueen or Jason Statham. Getting in-your-face just seems like overkill.
Speaking of overkill brings us to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a.k.a. ‘Transformers 3’ (numbering sequels is so 20th-century), a film which has aggression – and overkill – hard-wired into its DNA. Its very form is aggressive, 157 minutes long with a massive action climax taking up the entire last third. Its content is aggressive, not just the nominal plot (good and bad robots fighting over a world-domination thingy) but the raucous, relentless, in-your-face tone. The first half is comedy, so the aggression is actually quite funny. The second half is action, so the aggression starts to grate.
US reviewers, obviously more attuned to these things, spotted an anti-Obama subtext, which I totally missed – but it doesn’t surprise me, since director Michael Bay (an aggressive man, by all accounts) has a gung-ho sensibility fundamentally at odds, both politically and personally, with Obama’s professorial restraint (it’s startling when we see US soldiers attacking and their enemies are carrying actual, real-life Iranian flags; doesn’t Tehran have a multiplex?). Shia LaBeouf is our hero, Sam Witwicky, a goofy teenager in the first Transformers, a blank page in the second, disappointing Transformers – and now grown up into an Angry Young Man. Initially he’s angry because he can’t get a job, even though “I’ve saved the world twice!”; then he’s angry because his parents keep needling him; then he’s angry because the CIA won’t listen to him, even though he’s the Autobots’ (good robots’) main human contact. “You’re a messenger. You’ve always been a messenger,” he’s told, crushingly. “I just want to matter!” says Shia angrily.
Rage, like aggression, is a good thing in comedy. Dark of the Moon is funny, not because the jokes are great but because everyone’s so angry, like those New York films of the 70s (see e.g. the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three) where even the cabbies and passers-by are forever barking and sniping. Shia tries to force his way into a secured facility; the guards wreck his car, but stand down when orders arrive to let him in. “You’re fixing my car,” snaps Shia, strutting like a cockerel as he makes his way to the entrance. The guard sniggers unpleasantly. “No? You don’t think so?” challenges our hero. It’s a throwaway moment – but in fact the whole film is like that, living on its nerves. John Malkovich (hilarious, as ever) plays a boss from hell who at one point upbraids an employee for holding a red coffee cup on the “yellow floor”. John Turturro plays a splenetic ex-CIA agent, first seen arguing heatedly on live TV. Frances McDormand plays a mannish harridan who hates being called “ma’am”. The whole film seethes with testosterone – the only bit of estrogen being British newcomer Rosie Huntington-Whiteley whose character is conspicuously sweet and harmless, glimpsed in her panties clutching a large stuffed bunny.
Malkovich and McDormand were also in the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading a couple of years ago, and that’s the kind of film Bay should make – a frantic farce with everyone constantly on the make. Instead he makes action movies about giant robots, which is a problem because he really can’t do action. The extended climax in Dark of the Moon is initially rousing but increasingly tedious, because the action doesn’t flow. The images don’t cut together. Important bits (like the Optimus/Sentinel showdown) seem to come out of nowhere. There’s one amazing stunt, where our heroes slide down a glass skyscraper, but even that falls apart in the cold light of logic (think about which window they come out of, and which way the skyscraper’s leaning). Instead we get an hour of high-tech gadgets and soldiers yelling at the tops of their voices. Aggression again, but not so amusing this time.
There’s a Mexican stand-off between four robots in Dark of the Moon – a moment when all four are pointing guns at each other – but it’s not exciting because they all look the same. Apart from a couple of gremlin-like sidekicks (who soon disappear from the action), the mechanical characters are faceless here. Transformers 3 is a huge improvement on Transformers 2, and you have to give Bay some credit for imposing his franchise on the world just by being bigger, louder and more exhausting than anyone else – but what’s the point of spending an estimated $195 million on a movie when you don’t even have decent robots, let alone plot or coherent action, just nervy comedy and a bunch of people sniping at each other? To quote Mr. Malkovich: “WTF to that”.
DIRECTED BY Michael Bay
STARRING Shia LaBeouf, John Turturro, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
US 2011 157 mins.
