Movie review: Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

The point is, with the release of Dark Of The Moon upon us, all involved are insistent they upped their game this time. We're here to tell you that, in fact, no, they have not. Because although the third Transformers movie is indeed a better movie than the last one, it's still the same 30 seconds of fun, repeated over and over and over. AND OVER. In 3D.

Dark Of The Moon kicks off with a neat bit of revisionist history, proposing that the 21-minute break in radio silence during the Apollo 11 space mission was orchestrated so that the first men on the Moon could go and nose around a downed alien spacecraft. Inside lays the prone body of Sentinel Prime, predecessor of Optimus Prime and a badass bot in possession of a voice that sounds suspiciously Spock-ish.

Flash-forward to the present day, and Shia LaBeouf's kid-in-perennial-peril Sam Witwicky has a new hot girlfriend (pants model Rosie Huntington-Whitely, replacing Megan Fox) but still can't find a job. When the Decepticons rear their ugly metal heads one final time, Sam warns the US government – in the form of a slumming-it Frances McDormand – and reteams with the Autobots in order to face mankind's greatest threat to date: invasion.

There can't be a man, woman or child on the planet by now who expects anything other than eye-candy and a brain-massage from Transformers movies, and Dark Of The Moon follows suit – it won't trouble the grey matter but it gives the synapses a good work out.

If you were worried that Michael Bay's frantic directorial style would be rendered even queasier in 3D, then rest easy – the added dimension actually makes the Bayhem easier to follow, prising apart the collections of clanging cogs during fight scenes and giving action sequences true depth. The final 40 minutes are an outstanding technical achievement, the high point being the collapse of a skyscraper courtesy of giant Decepti-worm, Shockwave.

However, for the movie to really kick into top gear, you have to wait a bum-numbing hour and a half to get to the good stuff. Before then, you have to make do with cringeworthy lovey-dovey scenes between LaBeouf and Huntington-Whitely (no worse than Megan Fox but still a thankless character saddled with dreadful dialogue) and endless scenes of comedy diversions that range from 'passable' (Alan Tudyk's bodyguard provides mild LOLs) via 'embarrassing' (John 'I'm here for the paycheque' Malkovich) to 'kill me now' (stand up and sit down Ken Jeong).

In all honesty, you could snip a whole hour from Transformers: Dark Of The Moon's running time and still have no less a movie. Entire sub-plots come to nothing, seemingly only included because someone had a fun idea and no one was willing to cut it. When your franchise has made over a billion dollars, it turns out that anything you want to include in your movie, you can include in your movie.

Dark Of The Moon is far from the disaster that Revenge Of The Fallen was, but the best bits are all just amplified versions of scenes from the first movie – some of the plays from the final Chicago sequence look to have been lifted wholesale. Whether or not the Transformers franchise will continue after this final hurrah is unknown, but maybe it's best Bay bows out now, before he has to start making excuses again. 3/5

Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is released on Wednesday 29th June | Add your review