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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/2/07)

It's been a summer of fast-food movies, but get ready, because the ultimate Happy Meal has finally arrived. That's not a comment on its all-enveloping marketing strategy, just that, like a Happy Meal, Transformers is chock full of things of dubious quality that inexplicably taste good. Mashing a military action film, an alien invasion movie, and a disaster epic into a meaty patty and grilling it up with loads of cheese, Transformers initially goes down easy, but gets less appealing as the digestive process progresses.

Food metaphors aside, Transformers is every bit the big, dumb, giant-robot action flick you expect it to be, so anyone who feels the need to criticize it for not being more needs to take a gander at the opening credits. You see, "Hasbro," the toy company that brought Transformer toys over to the U.S. from Japan, is listed as a producing partner.

This is a big toy movie directed by the one man who knows how to play with big toys (little toys like character, dialogue, emotion, and pacing, however, still elude him). And for the first hour and a half, it's pretty damn entertaining.

The story basically involves an intergalactic quest for a powerful, life-giving cube that brings two warring alien factions — the noble Autobots and the evil Decepticons — to Earth. Able to disguise themselves as anything machine-like (usually vehicles), these invaders track down the person who holds the key to the cube's whereabouts: the great-grandson of an artic explorer (still with me?) who first made contact with their race. Although this storyline sounds like a convoluted mess ('cause, well, it is), Bay at least layers the film with enough gags — some of them really effective, like a sly Kill Bill reference and the use of the toy's commercial tagline "more than meets the eye" as a fumbled come-on attempt, and other gags not so much — to make it clear that you're not meant to take any of this too seriously. LaBeouf's sarcastic Sam Witwicky — an average kid with a strange tie to the alien invaders — is charismatic and generally likeable, and his scenes with his parents (Kevin Dunn and Julie White) are probably more entertaining than they have any right to be. I mean, these are supposed to be filler scenes between action, but Dunn, White, and LaBeouf have an easy chemistry that almost makes you want to see more of them together.

Almost.