Directed by Michael Bay
Rated PG-13
(Two stars)

If you’ve ever shared a house with an 8-year-old boy, you’ve undoubtedly had a close encounter with a Transformer—those toys that, with a few twists and snaps, morph from trucks into robots—probably in your stocking feet and with the unfortunate addition of a coffee cup in your hand (I’ve been there).

Two years ago “Transformers” took the popular toy line from being underfoot onto the silver screen. The film was a textbook lesson in how to balance bone-crunching CG action with a funny story about a hapless high-school kid who thought he was buying his first car, not a galactic warrior.

The result was one of the best popcorn movies of the year.

Now with the franchise’s second film, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” we get another lesson: that more is less.

The story picks up with our hero, Sam (Shia LaBeouf), heading off to college and saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Mikaela (Megan Fox), and his trusty Camaro/Transformer, Bumblebee (Bee to his friends). Sam doesn’t realize that trouble is brewing.

An evil faction of transformers called Decepticons (that Sam, Bee and their transformer buddies defeated in the first film) is planning a comeback. Worse for Sam, the Decepticons have decided that he has some secret information locked in his mind that is key to their plans.

Before the first week of college has ended, Sam, Mikaela and Bee are on the run trying to save Sam from having the Decepticons perform a very unpleasant download of his brain.

From here the plot starts running in circles. The State Department chooses this moment to evict the good transformers, called Autobots, from the planet; Decepticon reinforcements start dropping in from outer space; the Autobot leader gets mortally wounded protecting Sam—who can bring him back to life if he can only get him to Jordan—and, as if all of that isn’t enough, Sam’s mom eats some pot-laced brownies.

Usually a plot outline like this can be traced to too many beers in the script-writing sessions. But “Revenge of the Fallen” has the look of a film that was written in its animation department.

The story is an unrelenting flood of CG action sequences—all of them impressive in their detail, and some of them quite good—that are patch-worked together into a hundred and fifty minutes of sensory overload. It’s as if the producers told their animators to “just go crazy and if we like what you come up with we’ll work the plot around it somehow.”

The only way to truly enjoy this film is to buy about eight boxes of Junior Mints and wolf them down during the opening credits because you’ll need to be in a pre-diabetic sugar rush to process the onslaught of visual stimuli.

What gets lost in this animation free-for-all are the humor and charm that made the first "Transformers" film such a pleasure to watch. “Revenge of the Fallen” can’t find the comic counterpoint to the film’s action sequences.

The writing strikes false note after false note and so do the performances—even those of the very talented Kevin Dunn and Julie White as Sam’s clueless parents.

In the first "Transformers" film, Shia LaBeouf came across as a young John Cusack. Here he feels like he would be more at home in “Gossip Girl.” As for Megan Fox, she’s been reduced to eye candy.

The film’s one bright spot is the return of John Turturro as the caustic government agent Seymour Simmons—who so disgraced himself in the first film that Sam finds him working in his mother’s deli.

Turturro is determined to have some fun with his role whether the writing is up to par or not. He’s a reminder that even in action films its OK to goose the funny bone as well as the adrenal glands.