I was not really impressed, actually. Here's my review:
First off, the marketing campaign seems to have worked. The crowds coming to see the movie required not one but two separate theatres to house them in. I don't think I've seen that before. Of course, the vast majority of the audience where men between 20 and 35 :P Although there were some women.
As for the movie itself, I was quite underwhelmed. At the start it provided a logical progression from the first movie: the Transformers are on Earth, and the Autobots and the miltary of the US and UK have teamed up to hunt down the remaining Decepticons, hiding in various locations. They operate from a military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and have been joined by a number of Autobots who answered Optimus Prime's call at the end of the last movie. Among them the impressively cool warrior Sideswipe, the three Arcee motorbikes and the twins, Mudflap and Skids.
The opening scene is set in Shanghai where the massive Decepticon Demolishor is hunted down and killed. Cool action sequences, most notably of Sideswipe slicing the Decepticon car Sideways in two. Sadly, that is all we'll see of both these new characters.
From that scene things get worse. Whereas the humour in the first film bordered on slapstick, it was fresh enough to be entertaining. I would not be surprised if some of the scenes with Sam and his parents where the result of the actors' improvisations. In ROTF, though, all the humour is scripted and falls horribly flat. Some is just gross. Think dogs humping each other, Sam's mom high on spacecake and the tiny Decepticon-turned-Autobot Wheelie humping Michaela's leg... Cringe-worthy.
Surprisingly, the comic relief in the form of Skids and Mudflap was not too bad. They are characters in the mold of Jar Jar Binks but their banter amongst each other and against Sam's sidekick Leo was short enough to not be too bothersome.
Despite the film's running length of 147 minutes, things felt rushed. Optimus Prime's death at the hands of Megatron, his subsequent resurrection, Jetfire's sacrifice and the destruction of The Fallen and his machine. It all happened so fast that it felt it was just all in a day's work. For Michael Bay, I think, it actually is
Despite the popularity of the sport, I won't be participating in a round of Bay-bashing. As director, he does his thing and he does so well enough. No, here the writing was the problem. Too much crammed into it (most of the interesting new Transformers are not named, killed off in the first minutes or merely seen from a distance) and failed attempts at humour seriously hurt the film.
Most striking disappointment: Devastator. He is
not the combination of seven Contructicons, but seemingly an independent mind which happens to have a robot form made out of seven contruction vehicles. While Devastator was climbing the pyramid, the Constructicons themselves were in the fight in the village. I call that a major screw-up.
People focus on those bad points and then forget the good points and voila - horrid reviews.
