I wonder if the phrase "three strikes and you're out!" has any relevance in Hollywood

Rating: 3/10 (16 July 2011)

I wonder if Hollywood (or at least 'director' Michael Bay) is familiar with baseball. If so, I wonder if they (or he) is aware of the old phrase "three strikes and you're out!" I am also kind of hoping that has some coherence in the filmmaking industry, for that means I shall never have to endure another one of these overproduced, headache-inducing clumps of schlock again. Michael Bay has struck out three times now and I hope he stays on the bench.
It's never been the premise of the "Transformers" trilogy, all directed by Michael Bay, that I've had trouble with. On the contrary, it was a setup that I really rooted for. It was the execution that I've always had problems with. The lumpy writing, the overblown running time, the unfunny (and mildly offensive) so-called humor, the action scenes so poorly directed that it was hard for me to even appreciate the skill and craftsmanship required to bring them to life.
My criticisms of the first two movies return once again for the third (and hopefully final) installment, embarrassingly titled "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." As it turns out, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, it was to exploit an alien spacecraft piloted by refugees from the robotic planet Cybertron. Flash-forward to present day and we have Sam Witwicky (still played by Shia LaBeouf) with a new girlfriend (Rosie Huntingly-Whitely) and a bigger egomania than ever. When Decepticons start popping up all over the world again, he comes to discover that they are planning to revive their fallen planet. From there, the plot continues to thicken, all the way up to a preposterously boring climax which stretches a seemingly endless forty-five-minute stretch and wrapping up with a cold, lifeless halt instead of a rousing conclusion.
Like the two movies that came before it, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" has amazing visual effects. The transfiguring mechanical titans are blended seamlessly into the live-action backgrounds and with their flesh-and-blood costars. There is hardly a single weak special effects shot in the movie, and there are hundreds of them. And yet Michael Bay and screenwriter Ehren Kruger once again choose to toss their intrinsic awe and power out of the window in favor of overpopulated, bland stick-figure human characters. There are not only too many human characters in the movie, but they are all very badly-written and oftentimes poorly-acted. Even Mr. LaBeouf, who was charismatic in the first movie, is obnoxious here as all he has to do is act pompous and schizophrenic and shout all of his dialogue until his voice goes raw. Even great talents like Kevin Dunn, Josh Duhamel, Frances McDormand, even John Malkovich, are given excess screen time to do next to nothing. Gone is Megan Fox and that is a shame, for her replacement, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is a complete bore. Not only is she resorted to just standing around and screaming while the camera lasciviously ogles at her lower extremities, but unlike Miss Fox, she does not have any real star quality. I did not think Megan Fox's performances in the first two movies were particularly good, but there was a budding talent, a promise that she would one day become a considerate actress.
I never got that sensation once with Miss Huntington-Whiteley.
There's not one character who is interesting enough to deserve so much attention, and yet Mr. Bay lingers upon them consistently, over and over again. And when the transformers are on-screen, they have nothing to do either. They don't do any more than what they did the first two times around, which is change forms, make sloppy cultural jokes, and mutter pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo. When they take each other on, director Bay shoots everything at such close angles and so fast that it was impossible for me to tell which robot was on which side, who was transformed and who was not, which robot was betraying his side and who was not, who had died and who had survived, and bottom line, I just did not care. And that cheap gimmick of an action scene first playing at regular speed, them all of a sudden slowing down, and returning to normal pace does not wow here. It didn't work before Mr. Bay used it and it certainly doesn't work now that he is using it.
Now I will admit there were a couple of nifty moments that I did like. And guess what? They did revolve around the special effects. An out-of-the-blue battle on the highway scene, with Mr. LaBeouf being tossed out of his transformer-car and then caught again was quite thrilling, as were the scenes with a new robot equipped with giant worm-like tentacles. I wish he had been in more of the movie. But as a totality, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is just another clanging, obscenely overproduced mess from an aggressively misguided director. It clangs and clangs for a punishing 157 minutes, which seems like twice that long, and then cuts off without really ending. But that's fine with me, because I would rather not revisit this same scenario again.