The gadget action flick “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” earned $60 million in its first day of release Wednesday, a new record for a mid-week opening, topping “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in 2007. It was the second biggest one-day haul for any movie ever, trailing only the Friday opening of “The Dark Knight” in 2008.

By Sunday, the movie had already surpassed the $200 million mark.

I’m not surprised. This technically impressive sequel ups the ante of the very lucrative first “Transformers”–it’s longer, louder and less concerned about niceties like plot and character.

If you don’t count Megan Fox’s physique as a speaking part, the characters who are generating the most discussion are Skids and Mudflap, two “Autobots” that are getting blasted by critics (like me) as racist stereotypes, akin to Jar Jar Binks. They smack each other around, say they come from “da hood” and admit they can’t read. One of them has a gold front tooth.

Director Michael Bay is deflecting the criticism, saying that they are merely robots. (”I did it for the kids,” he said.) But that’s nonsense. The appeal of all the robots in the movie is that they talk and behave like humans. They have personalities. In the case of Skids and Mudflap, they have the personalities of bug-eyed comic-relief sidekicks in minstrel shows.

The closer you look at “Revenge of the Fallen,” the creepier it gets. One ostensibly heroic Autobot calls a wounded, surrendering adversary a “punk ass bitch” before executing him. (Although it’s hard to tell the shape-shifting robots apart, I think he is the same character who later rallies the troops by invoking the battle cry of post 9/11 America: “Let’s roll!”)

This is one of the few action films that mention the name of an actual U.S. president–in this case, Pres. Obama. So it’s noteworthy that Obama’s personal envoy on the battlefield is a weaselly bureaucrat who tries to stop the fighting (but is tricked into jumping out of an airplane to save his own miserable hide).

Bay goes out of his way to identify the aircraft carrier in the battle sequences as the U.S.S. John C. Stennis–twice. The Stennis is the huge, state-of-the-art vessel where Bay had the premier screening of his “Pearl Harbor.” (I was there.) In the interviews for that movie, star Ben Affleck noted that Stennis, a former senator from Mississippi, had been a racist who opposed anti-lynching laws and school desegregation. “But people can change,” Affleck said.

Just like robots, right?