Paramount Pictures

Optimus Prime (left) and Ironhide are the good-guy Autobots in "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

Paramount Pictures

Megan Fox (left) and Shia LaBeouf are shown in a scene from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen."

English writer Evelyn Waugh once compared World War II's Battle of Crete to German opera.

"Too long and too loud," the acerbic writer said. He could just as well have been describing "Transformers: The Revenge of The Fallen."

The first episode in this franchise was preposterous. Still, "Transformers" was kind of fun because the nerd got the babe as well as a yellow Camaro that turned into his faithful robot buddy. The hokey dialogue wasn't fatal and the visuals were astonishing. This sequel takes itself too seriously despite some unsuccessful off-color humor and misconceived jokes.

Michael Bay returns to the director's chair and the guy who also made "Pearl Harbor" unleashes his worst instincts. Bay apparently has never met a cliche he didn't like. Ditto juvenile jokes.

Here we have a running joke about the sex lives of dogs. We also get to see robots who take on the mannerism's of inner-city home boys, a comic misfire if there ever was one.

Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam, the teenager with the drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend and robot car. The appropriately named Megan Fox returns as Mikaela, his gear-head sweetie. The last time around, the two were involved in a battle between the good robots (Autobots) who turn into cars and trucks and their counterpart bad robots (Decepticons).

These clanging, shape-shifting aliens had fled to Earth from their doomed planet and the Decepticons want control of Earth. However, the Autobots under the command of Optimus Prime prevailed. At issue was a mysterious cube -- don't even ask.

In the sequel, the bad bots are making a comeback and Sam is the one person standing in the way of their survival. But that's not his only problem. His girlfriend can't get him to say the L word (as in "I love you") and his nutty parents follow him to college.

Bay can definitely do big, but coherent storytelling does not seem to be his chief talent. He jumps all over the place and tangles the narrative in unnecessary story lines. The movie globe trots from New York to Paris to Cairo and it involves seemingly endless scenes of military deployment and wholesale destruction.

The original "Transformer" allowed you to have a human connection to Sam and Mikaela. Here, the L word is the biggest human issue and you have to figure Sam for a case of arrested development.

Bay leaves no hackneyed war-movie convention unturned. There are enough heroic gestures of sacrifice for a half-dozen movies. However, they don't stop the sense that you're watching a hardware movie in the hands of a technical expert. At some point this marathon junk-yard smackdown makes you fidget and look at your watch despite the brilliance of its special effects.