Stick to the toys, forget the messy movie

Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars.

Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend.

I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and a lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although — hello! — you can't outrun an explosion.

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to flawless perfection and look just like real women, if

you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines.

The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with ... fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples.