Help! Megan Fox is in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and she can’t get out

Girding for Battle

Anglo-American cat fight, global carnage

England’s class snobbery and accompanying hypocrisy is usually good for a few chuckles; anyone hoping to see those stiff upper lips and stiffer necks deflate a bit will doubtless enjoy Easy Virtue, which finds more than a few easy targets as it chronicles a once-great family in decline in the 1920s. The movie’s antagonists are the exquisitely imperial Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas), embittered matriarch of a country estate, and Larita (Jessica Biel), a brashly glamorous American who, in between causing scandals by winning car races in Monte Carlo, has had the temerity to marry Mrs. Whittaker’s only son.

When Larita is presented to the family at the beginning of the film, Mrs. Whittaker sniffs in horror, “Oh, you’re American.” Let’s just say that Anglo-American relations go downhill from there. Larita thinks this is just a brief visit prior to settling in London. Mrs. Whittaker, meanwhile, has plans that her son will take charge of their vast country holdings. (As we slowly learn, Mr. Whittaker—the always-appealing Colin Firth—had returned from the Great War broken in spirit and newly filled with scorn for the established order.) Soon, the battle between the two women starts in earnest. When animal-loving Larita mischievously sabotages the foxhunt that she’s bullied into participating in, Mrs. Whittaker takes revenge by provoking Larita’s near-terminal hay fever. This leads to much more crossing of swords, until Lorita’s mysterious past as a widow catches up with her, provoking the droll crisis that ends the film with a radical rearrangement of relationships and circumstances.

Based on a minor melodrama (!) by Noel Coward that has been substantially tweaked into more comedic form, Easy has been pilloried by period purists but is certainly entertaining for all that, especially thanks to the many sardonic quips that Mr. Whittaker makes at the expense of his wife and her pretensions. Admittedly, the movie’s satiric targets are assailed with bludgeons rather than rapiers, and Biel’s performance is a bit wooden. On the plus side, director Stephan Elliott (Priscilla: Queen of the Desert) pushes the plot along and includes enough old-time tunes (such as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave”) that at times this verges on being a musical. So, keep your expectations low and this will be an amusing time at the cinema.

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Easy Virtue ★★★
Directed by Stephan Elliott
Starring Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth
G - 98 minutes • Continues at the Odeon

The violence is more overt—and infinitely more repetitious—in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, yet more bombast from Michael “blast and blast again” Bay, the maestro of mayhem most monotonous. This sequel once more plunges us into a peculiar world where humans have forged an alliance with Optimus Prime, the leader of a tribe of intergalactic “autbobots”—strange mechanical creatures that can speedily transform from their innocuous disguise as cars or trucks into baroquely stylized fighting machines. It turns out there is a millennia-long feud between the good autobots and their nasty counterparts, known as decepticons. And for reasons beyond the reach of logic, this feud is being fought on earth.

The storyline whips the audience along, and provides lots of half-baked comedy and entertainment in between ever-more-elaborately-staged battles between machines that look so similar that you can’t tell the good ’bots from the bad ones. The movie’s college-age hero (Shia LeBeouf) is in the middle of a cute love story (or maybe just a major case of hormones) with a car-loving hottie (Megan Fox) who looks like a teen-friendly Vargas girl come to life. And there are even a few real actors along for the ride, most notably John Turturro as a paranoid hacker who finds out what it takes to be a hero instead of a cynic.

But mostly Revenge subjects the audience to an endless battering and buffeting—noise and fury signifying nothing very much. If you are an unimaginative 14-year-old male, this probably qualifies as a fun time at the movies. Anyone else would be better off sticking burning hot tacks in their eyes while getting a non-lubed colonoscopy. M

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Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen ★½
Directed by Michael Bay
Starring Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox and a whole lot of SFX
14A - 149 minutes • Continues at the Capital, SilverCity and Caprice