Another swing and a miss (minor spoilers)

Rating: 5/10 (6 July 2011)

We've come full circle and Michael Bay never realized that if he didn't sell out to market toys, sell drinks, and make a buck at every corner, he could have still made a load of cash and turned out a great product as well. The scene where the bird-like Decepticon murdered the family shows the kind of horror and menace that he could have built into each film and each Decepticon to make them true villains. Megatron could have become a menace in the same class as other historic on screen villains....instead, he was a mostly absent figure throughout 3 films that said some mean things, yet was completely incapable of ever appearing as more than a stumbling fool that was only a danger to anyone because he was so large. I doubt that anyone looked at the duel at the end of the film with any emotion that they were trying to destroy a truly evil villain......just some big Decepticon that made random appearances and couldn't really be taken seriously as a threat. Vader was a serious threat in Star Wars because he kicked the rebellion's rear in Empire.....the Decepticons never came close to an Empire moment.
The opening 5 minutes of the first film, and scarce moments of the 3rd film were the only fulfilling scenes of the entire trilogy when it was obvious that if each of the films followed that tone, that we could have had some special storytelling of good and evil on our hands....instead, we were bombarded with teenybopper scenes to get laughs, and ghetto speech to get the people that are going to make Idiocracy come to pass do their best LOL.
This movie drug along for a good while with nothing but the weak human characters trying to carry a flimsy mystery tale. Every time you'd think you were about to settle in to a serious film with terrifying consequences, Turturro's character (the most annoying character in film since Jar Jar Binks)was in the way again of any kind of plot development...it just drove home the point that Bay wanted to make so many factions happy that he completely lost his way and produced a lot of drivel dressed up with cool special effects and visuals. You will only enjoy this if you don't like thinking and you can tolerate heavy doses of stupid jokes and idiot humor.
This movie had promise, but missed, as did the entire series...sadly some potentially awesome villains were reduced to tools that couldn't take over a city, much less the planet. How is it the Decepticons whipped the Autobots right off of their own planet, but when they had them incredibly outnumbered in 2 of 3 films they never stood a chance at defeating them? How is it that their armor is basically like soda can aluminum when fired at by human machine guns in some scenes? Human soldiers taking down multi-ton killing machines with parachutes is a threat to humanity? Hopefully someone in touch with the darker potential of the series can reboot it and give us what it might have been.