The product-placement is out of control

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2011)

The best thing about these movies is how they look, how well the transformers integrate into the real-life footage to make a compelling action sequence. Here it's cranked to eleven, and the CG is very impressive. On the larger shots, even tiny transformers far in the background look convincing.
There a several action set pieces (specifically towards the end) which are easily some of the best of the trilogy. The whole scene with the collapsing building and the tracking shot of Optimus slicing and smashing his way through a bunch of decepticons are colossal showstoppers.
This is also one of the best 3D movies to date. One major critique of 3D is that 3D glasses make the film darker, but here they do a very smart thing, the film itself is brighter than your average movie and this problem evens itself out. Another thing that worried me before I saw it is that if there was so much high-speed action maybe that and the combination of 3D would give me motion sickness, end of the movie: no problems.
The Bad
The villains suck. Megatron does absolutely nothing throughout the whole film until right at the end, and even that was a let down. Shockwave appears briefly at the start and vanishes for two hours, he himself doesn't actually do much, it's all down to this big nameless tentacle- clad decepticon he works with. Starscream does nothing, but then he never did anything anyway. I'm not even going to mention Patrick Dempsey. But the biggest let down is with the movies main villain "Sentinel Prime". Basically he is Optimus' predecessor but he changed sides to the decepticons and made a deal with Megatron to bring life back to their home planet Cybertron. This is the driving element of the movie, but there are many plot holes from this. Early in the film Optimus basically says he wants to make Sentinel Prime leader of the autobots again, and offers him the matrix (an item that brings dead transformers back to life) but Sentinel Prime declines. Then he changes sides. Why did he decline taking the matrix? it would in definitely be a help in his ploy. Sentinel Prime gets numerous chances to kill Optimus once and for all, but like all lousy villains he delays his hand and Optimus lives.
The product-placement is out of control. I am not joking when I say there is a scene where Shia LaBeouf stops the movie to recite a Mercerdes Commercial