If you spent $24 seeing this trilogy, you should ask for $16 back

Rating: Null/10 (25 September 2011)

This movie was not good.
Tons of posturing. If you want to see scenes of the actors standing just right, this movie is packed with meaningless shots that look great. The one that put it over the edge was with the replacement to Megan Fox. The new girl was standing there with explosions behind her and a car flipped over. She blinked, but other than that there was nothing. However, from this she moment, we can make the connection that she went on to manipulate Megatron into action, which means she actually saved the day. During a literally explosive situation, this girl did two things: thought up a plan and looked nonchalantly amazing while doing it.
Difficult to follow action sequences. The fight sequences were like watching spaghetti get tangled around itself and other noodle in a thick, rich soup of tomato sauce. Putting it in slow motion, "it" being punches that blast robots apart or transformations from and to car form, did not make for good entertainment. If you did not get enough slow motion transforming in either of the first two movies, this may be your fix.
And, a tired franchise. Belligerent Sam. Boring/cliché jokes.
Energon detectors. Autobots doing the dirty work of the US government. Going to the moon only to peep aliens. Sam lands another model grade girl friend.
JJ Abrams, Mike Bay, and Jerry Brukhimer, love to take kind of controversial topics and use them as a platform. I cannot wait until one of these guys gets hold of a script about Christopher Columbus just to see how he gets into the minds of pre-teens, high-schoolers, and other impressionable demographics. Maybe they'll think up that Columbus left Europe to flee the zombie hordes only to discover an alien race building hydro electric dams on the bottom of the ocean and enslaving sea horse to carry the electricity on saddles made of silver to power a matter altering camera which would be meant to destroy humanity at a point just before it became to powerful to match, only find out they were too late; the humans were already too powerful because of their will to live, love, endure, and make movies about it.
Sam Whitwhicky had something funny about him in the first film. When Megan Fox was in his bedroom in the 1st movie and he had to deal with his parents, that was funny. But he grew quick tempered. His belligerence grew to be pretty excessive by the second movie, and in this one, he would have been tazed by any normal law enforcement agent with a zapper.
The over use of mini Autobots as a source of humor is akin to the Star Wars prequels using Jar Jar Binxs as a source of humor. Mildly amusing at first, but not enough to last for parts 2 and 3, for almost 5 hours. And, the minor character jokes get rehashed, too. The fat guy doing donut jokes was funny in the first one, by now all the jokes were forced and weak.
ON THE POSITIVE SIDE, sorry to ALL CAP, but this was mostly a nag so far, the brutality was great. I do not like on screen violence, so the humans being evaporated is not what I liked. Rather, it was some of the robot deaths that were pretty good. When you know a bad guy has got it coming and he only bleeds out -- that is not as satisfying as seeing his robot skull being taken apart. Plus, Optimus leveled the boom on some bad guys and the degree that he kicked butt had good "Wow" factor.
All in all, a less than average movie. What started as a good series should have stopped after number 1 and stayed in the realm of imagination or comic books. However, the money it pulled in for the movie company must have worth it for them, this site reported an income of over $1 billion, and that is what they they are in the business for.