** 1/2 (out of 5)

I must admit I have somewhat mixed emotions about this movie. On the one hand, taken purely as an action packed summer blockbuster, it delivers the goods and is quite entertaining. On the other hand, there are just too many things wrong with it to give it more than middling grade.

First, the good:

The special effects are great. Really, really great. Of course computers have always been able to render metal and rigid materials better than organic objects so the subject mater in this movie plays to the strengths of computer generated animation and it does not disappoint.

The action sequences are fast and furious and given the number of people who bite the dust, I can see why the movie almost got an R rating for violence.

Now the bad:

Everything else. The biggest problem this film has is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be a movie for kids at times. The prologue (a voice over) sounds like it came right out of one of the Saturday morning Transformers cartoons. Briefly explaining how the two races of Transformers came in being. The problem is it’s long on vagueness and short on details. Any ‘message’ in the movie is pretty much restricted to black and white good/evil archtypes. Evil means humans are lower life forms and should be killed or exploited, while good means killing people is wrong. Comic relief seems to be restricted to having the autobots speaking in 21st century pop-culture slang. Yo! Yo! Yo! Optimus is in the hizzzhaus! Yeah. Whatever.

At other times it tries to be a violent, gritty, action flick along the lines of Die Hard or perhaps Alien. The result for me was a constant cycle of tension and excitement followed by periods of eye-rolling induced groans.

Another problem the film has is many of the action sequences are cut so fast and so tight that it’s very difficult to know which transformer is fighter who. In the end it just became robots fighting robots for long periods of time.

Had the movie chosen to either be a kids flick or an adult-aimed action film, I probably would have enjoyed it much more.

The human element in the film is not bad, the two leads Sam Witwicky (Shia Le Beouf ) and Mikaela (Megan Fox) are passable, although I really had trouble understanding what Mikaela saw in Sam or why she stuck around once cars started turning into 50′ tall killbots. The best characters in the movie are actually Sam’s parents and the scenes with them are some of the funniest as well.

In the end, Transformers is fun, it’s just mind numbingly shallow and stupid…but then that’s what it’s supposed to be I guess. I’d certainly rent it and watch it again with friends or for a party, but I won’t be paying $9 to see it on the big screen again.