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BY MAGGIE SCOTT
This time, their plans don’t just include wiping out the human race. This time, the evil Decepticons of director Michael Bay’sTransformers are back in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen determined to destroy Earth’s sun.

And, they’re going to need their former nemesis Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) to do it. Sam, on the other hand, has been making plans to just be normal like any other red-blooded American boy dealing with issues—like a girlfriend (Megan Fox) wanting to hear the “L” word; a mother (Julie White) having a melt-down when she finds the baby shoes of her college-bound son; and a full-of-himself Princeton dorm roommate (Ramon Rodriguez) with delusions of computer geek grandeur.

But, Sam hasn’t been normal since he discovered two years ago that a souped up yellow Camaro could animate with ear-splitting grinding and crunching into a member of an alien race known as the Autobots. And, since he discovered that his smoking hot girlfriend Mikaela could kick Decepticon butt with the best of them.

Last time, Sam, his guardian bot, Bumblebee, Mikaela, and Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, were determined to keep something called the All Spark from getting into the Decepticons’ murderous metallic mitts. This time, it’s something called the matrix—a machine hidden in one of the seven wonders of the world and aimed right at the sun.

Although Sam arrives at Princeton determined to trade hero status for the rank of lowly freshman getting some laughs at a frat party, the Decepticons (one is ominously called Devastator), Homeland Security, a classified strike team called The Nest, an alluring Decepticon terminator, and Simmons (John Turturro). He’s the Sector 7 agent Sam outwitted in the first Bot-Con smackdown, convince Sam that being a normal man means not backing down from a fight.

And what a fight it is—thunderously ricocheting from the pulverized reading rooms of an Ivy League college’s library, to the obliterated archaelogical monuments of the Middle East deserts of Jordan and Egypt.

Bay tests the endurance of his audience with over two hours of action that sounds like industrial-size garbage disposals chewing on a load of silverware. Bay pounds away with a pyrotechnical ferocity that becomes the raison d’etre of the film and nearly makes the bots and the humans irrelevant, if not for the cheeky (at one point, literally) dialogue for Simmons and Sam’s endearingly loopy mom.

Fox pours on the pouty sex appeal, while retaining a modicum of modest innocence; Turturro steals the show; and LaBeouf makes it all look effortless as the boy-turned-man straight arrow with a spine of steel more tempered than any Bot’s or Con’s.

A Paramount/DreamWorks release, rated PG-13 for violence, language, some crude and sexual material and brief drug material.

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