Beyond The Twins: Another look at Revenge Of The Fallen’s Character Flaws

4. Bloggers Are Not Normal. Leo (Ramon Rodríguez) and Agent Simmons (John Turturro) are both revealed to run online information sites and immediately coded – in Simmons’ case, this dates back to the previous film – as being “weird” conspiracy theorists. Leo and Sam’s other roomies are also cut-and-paste fanboy pastiches, another carry-over from the first film, where Sam’s only friend (who he ditches for Fox’s character) is utterly devoid of social skills.

5. People Of Color Are Funny. Leo’s character is harder on the eyes and ears than Skids and Mudflap, and not just because he takes up more screen time. Besides being bound to Rule #4, Leo is little more than a coward, a hanger-on and an easy target for tazer-related “humor.” During the scene in Simmons’ butcher shop, one of the employees, Yakov (Sean T. Krishnan) is shown with buck teeth and a bug-eyed expression as Simmons berates him. And then there’s the Egyptian border guard (Deep Roy) who magically lets our heroes into the country just because they’re from New York, despite not being able to communicate with Simmons in English.

Defenders of Revenge will say, “But it’s about giant robots fighting each other! What did you expect, Shakespeare?” This argument is also weak. As someone who grew up watching kaiju films and the original series, I wouldn’t have had a problem with just that. But we don’t get enough of those moments anywhere in this movie. And we certainly don’t get any sequences like this one, which, even if it was “kids’ stuff,” actually drew an emotional response when myself and other young people saw it back in the day.

The only character, white, non-white or robot, who drew a response in the Revenge screening I attended was Sam’s mother (Julie White), and that’s thanks to the cheap gags she was involved in. The controversy over Skids and Mudflap isn’t just because they’re pointless characters; they’re pointless characters who sum up the worst of Michael Bay’s excesses, and serves as another example of how Hollywood seems to insist on dealing with POCs. Are there “more important things to complain about”? Maybe. But this isn’t and shouldn’t be an either/or discussion. If POCs are asked to invest in “America’s No. 1 movie,” we can’t just be represented as cheap punchlines – these kinds of questions have to keep being asked, regardless of how well this film does at the box office.

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