You'll want a fast-forward button

Rating: 1/10 (26 September 2011)

I was lucky to have missed Transformers 3 in theaters- you'll want a fast-forward button for this movie.
After watching one-and-a-half Transformers movies, I had hoped that Michael Bay would break away from his tradition of terrible plots, cheesy dialogue, boring action saturated with explosions and cliché characters, thereby making something that resembled an enjoyable movie. To the contrary, DOTM had everything listed above in even greater frequency. Bay even takes his time with it, drawing out the nonsense for three (3) hours! If anything, that's a feat in itself.
"But wait," you say. "Maybe I want to turn my brain off and just watch mindless action for a while." That's fine, I can respect that because aside from the pretentious I-only-watch-Oscar-worthy-movies film buffs, that's a guilty pleasure we all get from time to time. The problem with this film is that you feel like you're watching the same thing over and over again. If I'm going into a movie expecting nothing intellectual, at the very least I want the action sequences to be interesting/stylish, I want the dialogue to be funny, and I want the music to be captivating/cool. Movies in this category are seldom ever considered "good" by critics but have spawned memes like "this is sparta!" and "release the cracken!" and fulfill some of those things mentioned above.
Unfortunately, for all the money spent on the film's admittedly impressive visuals, the "action" in Transformers 3 expects audiences to be captivated by flying debris and destruction which makes up 2/3's of the film. It stops being impressive after watching it for an hour straight (an iPhone in the blender can simulate this pretty well). The musical score is equally uninspired, and the dialogue sounds like it was scripted by a 3rd-grader. I spend the time writing this review in hopes that I can save the time of others. Even for the action lover, there are much better movies to waste 3 hours with.