TRANSFORMERS: DARK Of The MOON (Michael Bay, 2011) **

Rating: 4/10 (18 July 2011)

The original TRANSFORMERS movie from 2007 was about the only Michael Bay effort I had enjoyed. The first sequel (which came out 2 years later), however, was a dreary mess and, while its follow-up has been touted in some circles as the best of the series, a local write-up gave it the thumbs-down; having watched the film for myself, I have to agree with the latter opinion!
To be fair to it, the first half is not bad – even if one has to swallow the ruse that Apollo 11's 1969 Moon landing (complete with stock footage, and barely look-alike actors in long shot, of JFK and Richard Nixon, not to mention the presence as himself of one of the real-life astronauts involved in that historic moment i.e. Buzz Aldrin!) was really a covert mission to inspect the crash-landing of a massive space-ship emanating from the dying planet Cybertron! It transpires that the leader of the benign Autobots, Sentinel Prime, had succumbed in that disastrous escape flight but his body is retrieved and revived by his successor, Optimus Prime (who had already featured in the first two entries).
Their nemeses, the Decepticons, soon learn of this and they determine to put their hands on the remaining set of pillars (they are already in possession of about a hundred others) that would save Cybertron and guarantee their dominance. However, Sentinel is not quite what it is played up to be, having sold out to the Decepticon chief, Megatron (which itself lies in a state of disrepair for much of the proceedings, the result of its failure to gain the upper hand in the two previous TRANSFORMERS pictures). In the wake of this, humans decide they can no longer trust the Machines and the Autobots are banished; this concept of 'aliens' being misunderstood, feared and ultimately hunted down was also at the core, as was the JFK cameo and the fact that a famous political incident has been incorporated into the narrative for that matter, of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS (2011) which actually preceded this viewing!
Anyway, mixed with all of this are the usual suspects – Shia LeBeouf (who after two adventures is still basically at the point where we first met him, despite his having been honored with a medal for valor by none other than President Obama!), his girlfriend (Megan Fox having been dumped by the production, her character is suddenly deemed fickle and unworthy of our hero{!}, so she is replaced here by the likewise stunning but even less able acting-wise Rose Huntington-Whiteley and John Turturro (returning as the eccentric ex-CIA operative who has almost gone bourgeois in the interim). Also on hand are Frances McDormand as a supercilious CIA bigwig (her would-be comic banter with Turturro belongs in a Coen Bros. movie but clearly not here!), the even more incongruous (and basically irrelevant) casting of John Malkovich – evoking Jack Nicholson – as LeBeouf's touchy boss and Patrick Dempsey as Huntington-Whiteley's own hunk of a superior (who is improbably revealed as being in cahoots with the evil Decepticons!).
The worst part of it, though, is the fact that the climactic action bout takes up the entire last hour and it does not even prove especially exciting (more often it is noisy and inordinately muddled) apart from the spectacular set-piece in which the protagonists are trapped inside a leaning skyscraper: when eventually thrown out and made to slide down its façade, they are required to shoot at the windows underneath in order to break their fall and literally drop back safely into the building!