Fun first half, bloated second

Rating: 6/10 (18 March 2012)

I realize that the "Transformer" movies are generally regarded as the non plus ultra of soulless commercial movie-making and that their popularity is supposed to presage the very demise of Cinema itself as an art form. But such an assessment fails to take into account the movies' sense of high-spirited fun, their playful wit and their over-the-top but sometimes amusing caricatures, human and otherwise (I can't speak for the universally reviled second installment, which I haven't seen).
Part 3, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," starts with a clever premise: that the original lunar landing was really just an elaborate, for-public-consumption-only ruse to launch a covert operation to explore a spaceship - the one carrying the initial wave of autobots - that had recently crash landed on the surface of the moon. Now a new race of evil bots, known as Decepticons, are becoming activated, threatening to destroy the good bots and take over the earth for their own nefarious purposes.
On the human side, young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) may have saved the world in the past, but he still can't find a job. But mere unemployment can't keep an honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool hero from saving humanity once again after the evil creatures pretty much raze Chicago in a literal scorched-earth policy of rampant death and destruction.
The one saving grace of the "Transformer" movies - which would indeed otherwise be the epitome of soulless movie machines - has been their sense of humor, their refusal to take themselves too seriously (especially the first one). Unfortunately, the wit and fleet-footedness of the first half of "Dark of the Moon" dribbles away in a welter of overwrought CGI effects and self-congratulatory seriousness towards the end. And LaBeouf gets stuck playing romantic lead to any number of automatons: his metallic buddies and his flesh-and-blood girlfriend Carly Spencer - and he isn't too terribly convincing in either role. But as an action comedy superhero, the kid definitely brings the agility and skills necessary to get the job done. Which pretty much describes the film itself, come to think of it.