Mind numbing!!!!

Rating: 2/10 (10 July 2011)

Transformers 2 was unbearably horrible, it was almost sure that part 3 would have to be better, as being worse would be nearly impossible. Unfortunately, Michael Bay has made a film about on par with his last trainwreck Transformers movie, and this, like this last movie is a thoroughly dumb and unenjoyable sensory overload full of poorly thought out plot points, dumb dialogue in this sort of surreal fantasy world where everyone is as goofy as can be.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is living in a nice apartment with his new girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), and needs some action in his life. He gets a new job, and is almost killed, and meanwhile Optimus Prime makes a trip to the moon to gain pillars and to bring back his old friend Sentinel Prime. Meanwhile again, Dylan (Patrick Dempsey) is Carly's boss, and Sam is jealous. And then Megatron and the Decepticons take over Chicago. And then there's action. And then it ends (thank God).
Transformers 2 must have been too serious for people, because Michael Bay just had the actors go all out slapstick performances. It was like an unfunny reproduction of the Three Stooges or something. Comedic scenes are comedic only because of these cartoon like performances where everyone is a comedian, and nobody seems to care about impending danger, but instead just want to lighten the mood with their nightclub routines. The first hour of the movie is so silly and lightweight, it literally serves no purpose whatsoever.
No scenes had any effect on the next scenes. Shia Labeouf is almost killed, and this scene is followed by a 5 minute speech about love with his parents. Chicago is destroyed by Decepticons, and immediately following we see people casually walking through destroyed Chicago like they're going for a stroll before work or something. An entire sub-plot about Sam getting a job is completely dropped, and serves no point in the movie except to introduce these bizarrely eccentric characters and give the audience some very dumb yuk- yuks. A bizarre scene has Russians pulling guns on Sam and John Turturro, and it literally is just there for laughs. It's so over the top, and cloying for cheap laughs, it's almost pathetic, and again, has no impact on anything. In fact, this entire movie could have been scrapped, and the big battle at the end could have basically been the film, because really that's all that mattered in the "plot".
Character motivations are way off too. Patrick Dempsey wants the Decepticons to win, because he was promised he will be saved, and not killed by them. He knows that their plot is to enslave humans, and he also admits a dislike for Megatron. When the Autobots come, Dempsey goes and tattles to the Decepticons. So...does he want to be a slave? Not tattling would have had no repercussion on him, and actually could cause him not to be a slave. Also making no sense is Patrick Dempsey's henchmen and workers who stay loyal to him in the face of total annihilation. As the robots destroy Chicago and kill people, they stay guarding Carly like this job is of some importance. Humans are being enslaved and they are taking some meaningless job when they should be running for their dear life. Again, it's like no characters think through anything that happens.
The Transformers are hard to watch. They walk around with English, New York, Italian and other accents and why? Are they from these places or just made to be exactly like Earth people? Megatron's henchmen robots are like Igor from Frankenstein, and one of them even has this giant rag on their head to make them seem like a lowly servant, but why? Why would a robot wear this? Did they see people doing this in clichéd sci fi movies? And to top that off, the robots know all the cool Earth slang and speak in it, and the little robots seem to have high libidos. The only purpose for them being so anthropomorphic is to get the audience to laugh at their lame one-liners, and they come off as horrible clichés.
This is a movie that is pandering to it's audience through bottom of the barrel dumb comedy, big loud action scenes and a nonexistent plot. But it's terribleness goes beyond that. It's a movie where even the most idiotic of individuals in the audience has more brains in their head than any of the characters, and nobody thinks through any situation, and no decisions make any sort of logical sense. It's a series of unnecessary events that leads to an overlong finale that is more headache inducing than fun. This might be a tiny bit better than Transformers 2, but the two movies are close to being on par. If you just think about any aspect of the film, you will realize nothing makes any sense. This was just awful!
My rating: 1/2 out of ****. 153 mins. PG-13 for violence and language.