Someone Take Bay's Directing Card Away

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2011)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)
1/2 (out of 4)
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse than TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, then comes the third entry in Michael Bay's series. I'm not going to waste my time describing the "story" as it's clear the screenwriters didn't spend more than a minute trying to put something together. The only thing I'll say about the story is that they try to connect our robots to the moon landing in 1969 and claim that Apollo 11 had several secrets. If that sounds interesting to you then it's best just to watch the teaser trailer and leave the rest of the film alone. This introduction only lasts around seven-minutes and then it's back to the brain dead, idiotic, loud and incoherent mess of a movie. It's really shocking that no one has ever tried to come up with a story that you could follow but I guess to Bay as long as you have loud action scenes then nothing really has to make sense. Taking a look at the box office numbers it's clear not too many people object to the horrid mess that this film is. I'm not sure where to even begin but once again I just don't understand the need for a "B" entertainment film to clock in at nearly three hours. It's 154-minutes to be exact but even this is an hour too long. The first thirty-minutes are pure boredom, the next hour has one long, drawn-out dialogue sequence after another and the final thirty-minutes gets to all the action as Chicago is destroyed but by this time I was wishing a real alien invasion would happen and put me out of my misery. This movie is without question one of the worst big-budget movies ever made. The story makes no sense. The comedy is so bad that you can't help but wonder what anyone was thinking. Just take a look at the job interview sequences. Then you have the incredibly stupid parents who are back with even more failed attempts at humor. The performances really aren't any better with Shia LaBeouf really sleepwalking through his part. It's hard to believe that he could have been any more boring as the performance is just downright annoying as is the character. Rose Huntington-Whiteley plays the girlfriend and her performance actually makes Megan Fox look like Meryl Streep. The supporting cast includes John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Patrick Dempsey, John Turturro and Tyrese Gibson but they too sink in this horrible material. TRANSFORMES: DARK OF THE MOON is just downright bad on all levels. The one saving grace are the wonderful special effects but these aren't enough to save the film.