I saw the movie finally... last year. I did not really think it was a great film by any standards, save for the special FX.
The whole time I felt like shouting, "WHERE ARE THE ROBOTS??!" There is a lot of the movie (as in, most of the first half of it) where it seemed like they were barely shown, and all it was was the human characters. Then suddenly you see a lot more of them. When the Autobots are finally introduced properly, I was a bit disappointed because they all looked the same to me apart from subtle differences. Somehow the robot designs are simultaneously brilliant and boring at the same time. With the exception of newcomer Barricade -who they had worked hard to make come off full of agression and edge for the five minutes they put him in the spotlight- the designs lacked personality to me. But what was worse was that they just seemed to lack personality in general. I'm used to thinking of the Transformers as "characters", but they just felt like... things... I don't know, like 'props'; like nothing more than cool special effects and not like "people" (lol I know the irony). And that half-hour action sequence at the end was just a pain to watch. Instead of being exciting to me, it just felt like boom boom boom "everyone dies!" for half an hour. In all honesty, I couldn't even tell who lived and who dies by the end, it was all so fast and mind-numbing. I was like, "Huh, what? Where is this character? Oh, they were supposed to have just died?" at the end >_<
I also don't really go for this kind of humour, so that didn't do it for me in the movie. Spike -I mean Sam- was okay, but I didn't really want a film about him, I wanted one about the Transformers, lol. In it's defense, I really liked that the girlfriend character didn't totally suck like girlfriend characters often do in movies. They were obviously pushing the teen romance angle, but they obviously wanted to make it a bit modern (and not entirely in the obnoxious sense), so she was somewhat interesting and I like that she wasn't totally useless
. Ack- okay and she was quite pretty too; quite an interesting look to her. Apart from the scene where the Decepticon Barricade attacks (I thought it was fairly cool), there wasn't a whole lot that jumped out at me about this film.
Loads of people I know like this film though. In all cases they were not people who were into it growing up or anything, they just like action/special effects and humourous movies alot.