No More Than Meets the Eye

Transformers - 3/5

You know where you are with a Michael Bay film. Complex, character-driven plots, beautifully shot in subtle shades of grey - he's not your man. You're gonna get car chases and explosions all bathed in bright sunset lighting. Lets face it, if the man was to remake Brief Encounter there would have to be a car chase in it!. But horses for courses - at the end of the day its a movie from an animated TV series which was designed as a marketing tool to sell toys. Subtlety is, quite frankly not on the agenda.

The plot is about ... oh, who cares? Its two groups of huge robots beating seven bells out of each other. If that sounds cool to you, you'll love it, if not, steer well clear. And on those terms, the movie has to be said to be a success. Yes, the dialogue is clunkier than the robots, especially in the dreadful explanatory bits. Yes, it gets confusing as to which robot is which at times - most of them never really given a chance to show any character traits at all (although the car that speaks through songs on the radio and the amusing little spy who turns into a mobile phone do get more of a look in). But at the end of the day this is about the action - the effects look great and the action sequences are way cool!

Two other things make this film entertaining. Firstly, there's the sensible decision to go for a light-hearted feel and the film is, in places surprisingly funny. Witness five huge robots trying to hide in a suburban garden or John Turturro's totally hammy turn as a rather inept government spook.

The other redeeming feature is the human lead. Shia LaBeouf is perhaps best known as the lead in Holes, but he's already been in Bobby and A Guide to Recognising Your Saints this year and still to come are teen thriller Disturbia and voicing the lead in penguin-flick (yes, another one) Surf's Up. This is a young man whose star is definitely in the ascendancy and you can see why here - he doesn't really have traditional movie star looks, but his performance has so much charisma and talent that he comes close to actually making the dialogue sound good. Definitely one to watch for the future.