Some people have asked me what I thought of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I have to say, my main impression more than a week after seeing the movie was that it was loud. I staggered out of the movie like someone's grandma after too many rides on Space Mountain, and I like big, dumb action movies. But since lots of folks are weighing in on the ghetto-stereotype robot twins that are just one example of the movie's bizarre reliance on ethnic typing, I wanted to break their portrayal down a little bit, since I think those two characters in particular contain the key to why the movie as a whole didn't work.
Ethnic humor is, I think, generally effective under a couple of fixed circumstances: a) when it comes from within the minority group being parodied, as with the best of Woody Allen and the Jews, b) it expresses something true that is difficult to say under polite or serious circumstances by carrying something far beyond its logical conclusion or realistic bounds, c) it subverts our expectations or understanding of the group in question, or of the teller. I think 30 Rock in particular has done a terrific job with ethnic humor, whether it's Irish (Season 1, Episode 17, when Alec Baldwin, his father, and his brother, played by Nathan Lane, announce the names of their fists, which are, respectively, St. Patrick and St. Michael, Tip O'Neill and Bobby Sands, and Bono and Sandra Day O'Connor, falling under categories a and b) or African-American (the running feud between Tracy and Twofer fulfills all three categories at once), especially in Tracy's plans for a Thomas Jefferson movie, which refer to the former president as a "jungle-fever haver," while also mocking African-American actors like Eddie Murphy:
The African-American coded robots in Transformers do none of those things. There's nothing clever about suggesting that black people can't read (unlike the 30 Rock episode where Tracy, who writes a column and complains about George Will, pretends he can't read to expose Liz's racism and to get out of work) or to have stereotypically ghetto characters threaten "to pop a cap" in someone or call someone a "pussy." All that coding is racist, sure, but as a cinematic choice, it's worse: it's boring.
In the first Transformers movie, the robots' personalities had an origin: Bumblebee didn't have a voice, so he spoke in slightly-too-apt choices of radio stations. Optimus Prime announced that "We learned Earth's language through the World Wide Web," which lent a funny sort of literality to their styles, like when one of the Decepticons grabed the main character and demanded to know "Are you eBay user LadiesMan217?" (Optimus seems to have read a lot of ponderous political philosophy blogs or something, while Jazz, proof that Michael Bay is no stranger to black stereotypes, seems to have limited himself to reading hip-hop sites.) I mean, it was weak gruel, but gruel none the less. The robot twins' personalities have no origin (they're originally old-fashioned ice cream trucks, hardly a racially coded means of transportation). And neither does anything else in the movie. There's no justification for anything, and no attempt to build any. All that's left is the sound and the directionless fury.