Paramount Studios is trying to call Friday 9/30/2011 official Transformers Day or some such bilge water. And in honor of that statement, which is the height of hubris, let’s lay into the unnecessarily long titled, unnecessarily, err.. long(155 minutes) Transformers 3 Dark of the Moon.
I think I’m going to rename this whole series by Michael Bay- who should be sweeping the aisles instead of making 200$ million movies- Trashcompactors, because I think watching the magic of a trash compactor is more entertaining.
There’s so much wrong with this attempt it’s difficult to start, but start we will with the returning lead actor Shia LeBouf. The entire first half of the film is marred by his over acting. He runs around screaming his head off because he’s frustrated that he can’t get a job or something and it is wildly out of place. When actors who have no talent err, they almost always go over the top, whether it’s justified or not -as is the case here.
Speaking of acting, Megan Fox got fired by Bay who was told to fire her by Stephen Spielberg because she said in an interview that Bay was a control freak who acted Hitlerian on the set. Not that I’m a Megan fan in any sense but she also said long ago that in the 2nd Trash-compactor movie, Bay neglected to spend any time on character. She didn’t get fired for that! You can guess why she got fired since it came from Spielberg and the word Hitler was involved… or something. Steve, baby, enough of the producer/ mogul thing. Get back where you were born to be, behind the damn camera.
So she’s been replaced by the black hole of acting talent, bee-stung lipped underwear model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Also lurching awkwardly onscreen is rapper/actor, i.e. fake musician/fake actor Tyrese Gibson. John Turturo is the only one onscreen worth watching in a supporting role. John Malkovich is here as well, slumming, his talent wasted. Shame on you.
The plot is universally poorly thought-out, as in the 40 minute long ending sequence where the humans try to knock out a control pylon and thwart the decepticons. But the pylon is at the top of a 80 story building and they have to get up high enough to launch a missile. So most of the action is trying to climb stairways to get a clear line of sight. Never mind that all the good guy trashcompactors could, I don’t know, maybe fly or jump there relatively easily!
By the time the pathetic, and I do mean pathetic ending rolls around with Prime trashcompactor stating his loyalty to the humans all I could feel was relief. After 2hr 40 min of being sonically and visually assaulted, it felt like not just the end of the movie but the end of a prison term.
Rating:
Character: 8
Plot: 14
Presentation: 29
Total : 51
