Based on the evidence of his new movie, "Transformers," Bay is 14 and living in his parent's basement, which is well-stocked with action figures, videogames, a dog-eared copy of Maxim with cover girl Megan Fox, and enough Red Bull to send him to the moon.

Based on Hasbro's line of toys that turn from cars and trucks and other objects into intergalactic robot warriors, the movie begins with some of these warriors attacking a U.S. military base in Qatar. Soon they're hacking into the Pentagon's mainframe, leaving the secretary of defense to bark out orders as only a character played by Jon Voight can.

The script, by "Mission: Impossible III" scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, jumps to L.A. teen Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf), whose involvement with giant killer robots begins when he wants to buy a car to impress a hot classmate, Mikaela (the aforementioned Ms. Fox). Sam finds a beat-up yellow Camaro that turns out to be the advance guard for the Autobots, the good-guy robot warriors led by Optimus Prime, a good-hearted leader in the shape of a semi truck.

After a long, long build-up, Optimus Prime enlists Sam and Mikaela to help the Autobots avoid human captors and locate a mystical power source, the AllSpark, before the evil Decepticons (the robots that have been attacking our military) find it.

Anyone who has seen a Michael Bay movie - like "Armageddon" or "Pearl Harbor" - knows he values hardware over human beings, so having giant special-effects-driven robot characters like Optimus Prime and his Autobots must have seemed like a dream.

Sure enough, anything Bay's human characters can do, the Autobots can do better. The Autobots fight as fiercely and as loyally as our human soldiers (led by Tyrese Gibson and Josh Duhamel). They understand computers better than our hackers (Anthony Anderson and Rachael Taylor). They do sophomoric comedy better than John Turturro, who plays the blustering head of a super-secret alien-tracking agency. And the Autobots (all designed after GM vehicles, in what is the most obtrusive product-placement in recent memory) are more fetishized by Bay's camera than Fox's well-toned midriff, though not by much.

Bay creates his usual over-amped action sequences and cool-but-empty special effects, and buffs them to a chrome finish. Some action sequences - like a high-speed freeway confrontation that's half car chase, half robot battle - are exhilarating. But after Bay piles on a dozen such scenes, culminating in a chaotic military stand in what looks like downtown Los Angeles, your brain may feel pummelled. Not that your brain had anything to do in the previous two hours.