Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The Transformers series comes to a merciful close with this hopelessly anticlimactic installment that is, as expected, just as underwhelming and unwatchable as its predecessors, with director Michael Bay’s notorious (and pervasive) incompetence ensuring that the movie boasts exceedingly little in the way of positive attributes. The disastrously padded-out storyline, which basically follows Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) as he’s forced to once again team up with the Autobots to defeat the Decepticons, is especially disappointing this time around, as the film kicks off with a surprisingly promising sequence detailing the title creatures’ initial arrival in our atmosphere back in the early ’60s. Bay, of course, squanders this opening by immediately segueing into a laughable early-morning encounter between Sam and his new girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s Carly), with the filmmaker’s slick sensibilities ensuring that this simple scene feels as though it’d be more at home within a Victoria’s Secret commercial. From there, Transformers: Dark of the Moon improves slightly (yet temporarily) as the emphasis is placed on Sam’s dogged job search – with the expected inclusion of needless subplots and periphery characters initially not as problematic as one might’ve feared. It does, however, become more and more difficult to overlook Bay’s penchant for eye-rolling instances of comedy, with Ken Jeong’s unreasonably over-the-top turn as Sam’s paranoid coworker certainly emblematic of the film’s questionable sense of humor. The meandering atmosphere, as a result, wreaks havoc on the movie’s already-tenuous momentum, and one inevitably can’t help but wish that Bay would just get on with it already – with the insurmountably overlong running time effectively (and palpably) draining the proceedings of its energy and ensuring that the action-packed third act comes off as a mind-numbingly tedious slog through gravity-defying special effects. The end result is a disastrous capper to one of the worst contemporary trilogies on record, and it ultimately goes without saying that Bay has, with all three of the movies, cemented his place as a seriously (and irredeemably) worthless mainstream filmmaker.

* out of ****