Over my years of having an opinion on things, people have always said roughly the same thing "Rift, you surprisingly well-hung genius, if you think you're so smart when it comes to movies, games, books etc. why don't you write reviews?" For a very simple reason - I've never really felt the need. And yet, here I am reviewing one of the biggest movies of the year, which just about everyone and their dog will see. Why? Because I feel the urgent need to tell you, the denizens of the internet, not to. Just....don't. If I were to go into details now why you shouldn't, then you wouldn't have to read the rest of this, and I'd have to go and do something constructive for a change.

The story revolves once again about everyones "favourite" dorky high-school kid Sam Witwicky (once again played by Hollywood's new favourite one-trick pony Shia LaBeouf), but now he's going to college, which puts strain on his parents, his relationship with his girlfriend Mikaela (the increasingly plastic Megan Fox). Add onto that the fact that he comes into contact with a shard of the now destroyed Allspark from the last movie (which happened to be in his jacket for 2 freaking years - I know he's supposed to be a typical teenager, but that's a stretch even for clinically-disorganised old me) he now is seeing symbols that the Decepticons want to.......oh forget it, no-one who wants to see this movie is really going to care about the story, even if it was worth caring about in the first place.

This wouldn't be so bad if the characters were worth taking an interest in. Again, forget about it. For a movie called "Transformers" there isn't really that much emphasis on the robots themselves. Most of the time is spent with Shia and Megan on screen playing out some pathetic high-school romantic comedy with some disposable government and military filler characters whose main job is to either spout crap expostitional dialogue, look manly or a bit of each. Okay, surely the big robots can make up for the excessive human element, right? Let's see..........nope. With the exception of the ever-deceptive Starscream and newcomer Jetfire (an ancient Decepticon turned Autobot who transforms into an SR-71 Blackbird), the automated cast is shockingly neglected - the enormous Devastator is reduced to digging a big hole and being the butt of a pathetic testicle joke, Ratchet and Ironhide (who survived the last movie) gets at most 3 lines between them, and the list goes on. Even worse, those who do get some serious airtime are hopeless, especially the awful "comic-relief" characters of Mudflap and Skids. Words really can't describe how painful they are to listen to. Put simply, the crew spent too much time digging through the list of old Transformers to give the new look and not enough time making them worth more than a cursory glance. It's what I like to refer to as the X-Men 3 effect.

It's about now that the millions of devoted fans of the previous Transformers will tell me that all that is excused by the action. This should be where the movie shines - after all, it isn't that great in the other departments. But no, it doesn't. You'd think a Michael Bay movie could at least get robot fighting right, however it lacks even that basic quality. It doesn't help that the overly intricate Transformer designs, while looking quite good in still shots, are hopeless for fight scenes. One example has Optimus Prime fighting 3 Decepticons in a forest. What you wind up with is a gun-metal grey Megatron and a gun-metal grey Starscream and a gun-metal grey....tank thing fighting a mostly gun-metal grey Optimus, with only a vague hint of blue and red to tell you which pile of scrap metal and gears you're supposed to be rooting for.

It gets worse. One reviewer described the action sequences as like watching the cameraman shooting the scene after his 50th Red Bull during sunset with extra lens flare and a mournfully billowing US flag in the foreground. He turned out to be right on so many levels. Picking Autobot from Decepticon was hard enough before the cameraman developed Parkinson's and started pointing the camera at the sun at every opportunity. Not that you could see them even then, since this is a Michael Bay moie, so not only does everything have to explode, but long, lingering shots of every kind of US military hardware take precedence over the robots the bloody movie is named after. For future movies, Michael, try spending less time dry-humping the back of an M1 Abrahms and more time making sure people can see what the hells going on.

So we've got bad story, iffy characters and action sequences that would be alright if you could see them. You'd think that adds up to an almost average movie. But it's easily worse than the sum of it's parts, simply because this movie oozes contempt for it's intended audience, which supposedly includes me. You've got crap human characters to make the story "relatable", when the bipedal automatons would have been perfectly capable of doing it themselves (hell, Wall-E managed to do better with robots that don't even resemble humans that barely uttered a word). You've got writing and humour which aims to please the easily satisfied [insert vague genre here] Movie crowd. You've got action sequences that try to tell me that big explosions and excess screen clutter equals intense and exciting as opposed to the Mongolian Clusterf**k it is. In short, this movie tried to be condescending with me, trying to coax me to lowering my standards so that I can think the $11 I spent to see it was worth the money and that I'd do it again when the inevitable sequel comes out. See, that's the sad thing - no matter what I say, this movie will still make enough money for Paramount to successfully invade and occupy Ireland.

Overall - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is poor even by the fairly low standards of American summer movies. Avoid if you can, unless you intend to play the "take a shot whenever you feel dumber for watching this movie" drinking game.