More often than not, Michael Bay gets a bad rap. Sure, he does nothing but pump out an endless stream of mindless action-movie cash cows, but he's usually so openly mercenary with his obnoxious product placement and focus-grouped one-liners that only the most arrogant film snobs would dismiss him as a moron. Add to that his legitimate talent for dynamic photography and explosive (literally and figuratively) action set pieces, and you have one the most technically able man-child directors working in Hollywood today. Which is why it’s such a tragedy that Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen only confirms every nasty thing every arrogant film snob has ever said about him.

The film is a mess. The plot — some malarkey involving symbols burnt into Shia LaBeouf's brain, Egypt, and a bunch of old Transformers who came to Earth thousands of years ago — comes and goes, the plot developments that aren't nonsensical are just dumb, and the “comic relief” oscillates between unfunny slapstick, unfunny scrotum gags and casual racism (the two “funny” transformers are Bay's own travelling minstrel show, a pair of robot twins who speak ’80s-era Ebonics through oversized metal lips). The film pulls its head above water whenever John Turturro is allowed to devour the scenery, but the overlong, overcomplicated script drags everything right back down faster than if it were a 20-tonne robot in the Pacific.

All of this could be forgiven if Bay's action set pieces were any good — everything but the racism, anyway —but few of them are even watchable. Like Terminator: Salvation last month, none of the characters are adequately developed to support the action, so all of the robot punching doesn't amount to much more than a couple big lumps of metal rubbing against each other. The handful that do work play heavily on the audience's nostalgia, but even these can be hard to remember amid the sheer volume of them: Transformers 2 runs for two-and-a-half hours, with well over two-thirds of that being devoted to boring, meaningless action.

On paper, Transformers 2 might actually sound like the perfect Micheal Bay film. The focus was clearly on crafting as many eye-popping action sequences as possible and pretty much everything explodes — or, no joke, is dry-humped by a robot before/while exploding. And for the 13- to 17-year-old male demographic at which this film is clearly aimed, maybe it is the perfect Micheal Bay film. Unfortunately for any of Bay's defenders, though, he's just given arrogant film snobs the world over all the justification they need for calling him an idiot.