Manly Movie Review

TRANSFORMERS

We all saw the teaser trailer about a year ago, with simply a shadow and a noise, followed by the Autobots symbol, and that's all most of us 24 year old males needed to decide to immediately fork over our money the day "Transformers" came out.

I feel fortunate to have been a fan of the cartoon at a younger age, and loved all the cheesy lessons of teamwork, leadership and honor. I feel like a lot of the flak that gets tossed at Transformers is people who saw the commercials of giant murdering robots and never saw the cartoon...so they were expecting totally mindless machines. Some critics missed the whole "this is based on cartoons" idea and one girl (obviously) criticized Michael Bay for calling the bad guys Decepticons...go play with dolls little girl, we here at Stiff Drinks played with Action Figures! (Info provided by unofficial Stiff Drinks Street Ninja Shmeegly)

I'll be honest, when the Autobots started talking to each other and to the humans with today's slang (kind of), I was a little uneasy and started to dislike the movie, but the movie so strongly invested itself in "saving the world", "protecting humanity", and "stopping the evil Megatron" (and damn was Megatron a bastard...well done), that I couldn't help but to be pulled back into the mindset of a little kid watching something pretty awesome again. I then started to remember how they all used to talk, and Jazz DID used to speak jive. Best damn thing in this movie to bring you back...they used Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime's voice, the goddman way it should be. He was the original Optimus Prime and was pretty much the voice that taught young bucks like myself how to sack up and fight for justice.

The action...how can big action brawls of giant killer robots not be awesome? They pulled off the action in this one in a big way...almost. You definitely felt you were in the middle of the action, but one thing i disliked is that you couldn't get a clear look at a few seconds in a battle, the camera was shaking the whole time, the robots were gorgeous, give them a few seconds to breathe, huh?

This is a grown up version of Transformers, no doubt, but I think it takes balls to put such blockbuster effects paired with such childish fun, and that's what's cool about Transformers.

We here at Stiff Drinks will rate a movie with what it intends...this was trying to give nostalgia and fun with a fresh new face. Pulled off very well. Don't agree? Blow me.

StiffDrinks Rating:

8 Scotches out of 10