Michael Bay's 'Transformer's: Dark of the Moon'

It's too easy to make fun of a Transformers movie, which is why it's so enjoyable to write a review of one. It's true that critically evaluating a bad movie is much easier than evaluating a good one. Being able to unleash all your pent-up bile in one go prompts creativity - apparently - so secretly critics love terrible movies. Many critics' reviews of the film that preceded Dark of the Moon (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, also directed by Michael Bay) are probably considered some of the best work of their career. It might have made one or two of them. I imagine a few of them will have another field day on this one.

I'll get the positives out of the way first. Yes, the special effects are outstanding as ever and Michael Bay can always be trusted to make his pictures look slick (but can someone please spare me of having to watch any more movies in 3D? I'm sick of this headache), filmed as they are in some kind of perpetual sunset. The Transformer designs and the movies' set-pieces are the realisation of a child's playtime fantasy and the opening sequence of an alternate history (I presume it never really happened anyway) - where the 1960s space race gets underway in order to investigate a crashed Transformer craft on the moon - aint half bad. It feels pacy yet uncomplicated and ever-so slightly sophisticated, sensations you will not experience again for the rest of the film.

For as soon as we arrive in the present day and Bay's cameraman begins trying to perv at Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's derrière, any sophistication is dispensed with, and you will not understand what in the hell is going on in the 'plot' from this moment on. I didn't get it anyway.

One thing I am certain of is that Michael Bay simply loves his stereotypes. Whether it's the black ex-soldiers that are based on the director's ideas about "the ghetto" or the Autobots seemingly styled on gruff, beer-swilling Brits (an Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman walk into a Transformers movie...), one could easily be offended if you took any of this movie seriously enough. And that's what we're encouraged to do by the defenders of the film, isn't it; to sit back, watch the film and suspend our disbelief? Well you won't believe the kind of dialogue screenwriter Ehren Kruger has got these pig-headed characters spouting.

And so brings me to my fundamental criticism of the Transformers movie franchise.

Obviously, the point of the Transformers movies is so we can watch a bunch of robots get all up in each other's grill. They argue and they scrap, they're impressively lent some gravitas in the voicing department by Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and newcomer Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime. They are the reason for the film. They receive scant assistance from their Earthly allies. Their name is in the title. The film is only interesting when they are on screen.

Which is why I question the need for the human protagonists at all. The main cast member, Shia LaBeouf, is now the most astonishingly irritating man in Hollywood and lost his spark long ago. In the first Transformers movie, LaBeouf's nerdy loser vying for the affections of an unattainable girl at least encouraged some empathy and there was some mild comedy from the likes of the late Bernie Mac and Kevin Dunn as Sam's father. Now Sam is some gloating rich kid with a girlfriend us commoners will probably only ever see in FHM, there is not a single moment of sympathy for the humans and the only comedy comes from John Malkovich being John Malkovich. And even he isn't in it very long.

And it doesn't stop at LaBeouf; instead of a core number of human characters, there's a whole ensemble of them. It's like Michael Bay was trying to make a version of The Wire with robots, which I don't think even David Simon could pull off. And so Ken Jeong is Sam's annoying co-worker (no really, he is annoying), Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson return as macho soldiers and the so-bland-he-might-turn-invisible Patrick Dempsey is Carly's boss.

Of course there's Carly herself, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, replacing Megan Fox as Sam's girlfriend. Whiteley is nowhere as bad as you've heard, but nor is she that great either. She's not Meryl Streep, but neither is she Sofia Coppolla in The Godfather 3 - like Paddy Considine's Le Donk, she just exists. And she at least doesn't look as though she's carrying a blade, so she has one up on the threatening-looking Fox. Similarly, cult hero John Turturro, plus new cast members Alan Tudyk, Oscar-winner Frances McDormand and Oscar nominee Malkovich all give the same "here comes my paycheque" performance. Why? Because this is not a Mike Leigh film. Are the critics really expecting anyone to put their best work in here?

So it's up to the Transformers themselves to make any kind of impact on the audience. I did genuinely feel something when one goodie Transformer was executed by another baddie Transformer, which is more than I can say for when any of the ant-like humans fell to their death out of a multi-storey building or got reduced to ash by Decepticon gunfire. When a CGI robot being 'killed' draws more emotion from an audience than when a human - mere cannon fodder in this script - dies, I not only despair for the filmmakers but return to my question of why the Transformers movies didn't just cut to the chase and leave the sketchily-drawn humans out of the storyline altogether. After all, don't these movies exist just for us to see big machines beat each other up?

Transformers: Dark of the Moon goes on approximately one hour too long and I think I can pin all those tedious minutes on whenever those pesky humans appeared on screen and Ehren Kruger had to write some dialogue like this was an actual film. It's not as though he's a professional screenwriter or anything.

So the movie is dull and often awful whenever real people are onscreen. So the storyline is convoluted hogwash and the cardboard characters are forgettable and occasionally - worryingly - racist. Don't get me wrong, this is not as bad as Revenge of the Fallen, but then not many things in this world are. And hey, Michael Bay isn't the worst director in Hollywood - at least his films are prettier than Roland Emmerich's.