Sam Witwicky is off to college, leaving his superhot girlfriend behind, along with his car that turns into a giant robot. Other vehicles that turn into robots are working with the US military to hunt out other, evil robot transformers who have become active all over the world. They are looking for something, something that will release an ancient evil known as 'the Fallen'. The final clue to the bad robots' plan lies in the head of Sam and suddenly he finds himself targeted at the centre of a war between the robots that could destroy the entire planet.

You have to hand it to Michael Bay, he certainly knows how to blow stuff up. So much stuff gets blown up in this film that you might wonder that there's anything left of the planet to be saved by the end. Barely ten minutes goes by without a major amount of stuff blowing up. Yep, Michael Bay knows how to blow stuff up.

Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to know how to do much else. TRANSFORMERS 2:REVENGE OF THE FALLEN takes its postage stamp plot and blows stuff up all around it, racing through action scenes and dialogue at the same headlong pace in the hope that if it moves fast enough the audience won't notice how rubbish the whole thing is. However, two and a half hours is a long time to pull of a trick like that. It feels much longer.

This is a film for the ADHD generation. It never sits still, never pauses for long enough to give its pretty human cast a moment or emotion worth a damn. The actors have nothing to work with. They are simply another set of toys to be thrown around in the whirlwind of explosions and don't stand a chance of humanising the film one little bit. Yes, Megan Fox is insanely hot and Shia LaBoeuf appealing, but it takes more than that to engage an audience.

One thing that might have saved it would have been a sense of humour, but virtually every single joke backfires (with the possible exception of John Turturro announcing 'this is top secret; don't tell my mother'). If your idea of hilarity is a small robot dry humping a girl's leg like it's a dog or the sight of a decepticon's balls (I kid you not) then this might be right up your street, but you might also want to seek some sort of therapy. The comic relief autobots are no funnier, but are around an awful lot longer.

The CGI effects are (the occasional shonky shot aside) very strong and the real reason that anyone will appreciate the film. The robots (and there are now so many of them that it's hard to tell them apart since most of them get barely more than a single scene) continue to transform and move around too fast to allow anyone to really follow what's going on, but on the odd occasion where they are not in motion you get to imagine what this franchise could really have been in the hands of someone with more interest in plot than fast-whirling bits of metal. Bumblebee and Optimus Prime get the best moments, but they are sidelined for long periods of time to make way for other, less memorable bots.

12 year old kids might get the humour (might) and will lap up the devastation, but everyone else will find their brains as numbed by the witless onslaught as their bums are by the running time. Though I never thought to say it, TERMINATOR:SALVATION is a better use of your time, joyless though it might be.

The trend is to say that the summer blockbuster is only a bit of fun and not meant to be great art. This is not fun and is soulless, empty and coldly calculating in its drive to make money. TRANSFORMERS 2 will make money, there will be a sequel and it's just a curse that we're saddled with these days.