The movie is like the play date from hell, the kind where a crew of children reduce your home to rubble and conduct endless bouts of loud war on the living-room floor while you ponder the propriety of opening a bottle of wine.

Eager to get myself into the right mindset for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I turned to the multiplex patron sitting next to me and politely asked him to slam my head against the forward seatback.

I would like to think that even if I was 14, either in body or spirit, I would still find this film an impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

It's hard to believe so much money was spent on something so horrendously, both visually and narratively.