Some movies are just bad, others, a crime against nature. Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon falls unequivocally into the latter.
T3 is a mind-f*** of epic proportions, feeling more like the left-overs of a PTO potluck gone horribly wrong than the summer blockbuster it deserves to be. I say deserves, because T3 is one of those movies that should have almost everything going for it: a huge budget, a director who knows how to entertain, a cast peppered with great talent and A-list actors, and a subject matter that requires very little plot. Robots fight other robots to save humanity and themselves in the process. Easy right?
But a funny thing happened on the way to delivering earth shattering mech fights in 3D. Some very funny things in fact. Which at first made me think T3 had given up and was just going for some laughs at its own self-aware expense. But things quickly turned boring, and then sad, and then traumatic as the final moments of the third act seek to undue all the damage that came before.
There were moments watching this movie when I thought it was playing out in real time, with out the help of words on a page or a guiding vision, as it ambled from bad jokes to overt sexification to clumsy dialogue, with one too many embarrassing music videos of LaBeouf sulking in his car.
L:et me just say this, after the movie’s moderately interesting prologue, Bay leaves viewers to gaze awkwardly at LaBeouf and Whiteley while they pillow talk about nonsense to U2’s Bono wailing like an Irish banshee in the background. But don’t worry, if that one scene isn’t enough, Bono has an encore later in the movie for all to enjoy.
There is no logical way to talk about T3 because the movie lacks any semblance of a logical progression itself. It’s as if a couple of Autobots were observing contemporary humanity and sought to test-group everything before including it. Young people are worried about the economy? Let’s have LaBeouf looking for a job out of college. This movie will be releasing on Independence Day weekend? Let’s insert several bizarre and unnecessary patriotic nods. America is fighting terrorists around the world? Let’s have the Autobots help them while rattling off obscure lines that sound like something a former President should be uttering from an aircraft carrier beneath the words “mission accomplished.”.
Of course, there are also the elements that are central to any summer blockbuster, but which somehow fail in an over the top crash and burn. Like Whiteley for instance, whose breasts are never missed by the camera, even as they sit at voluptuous high tide, nearly brimming over the objectified lace of whatever skimpy top she’s decided to don from one scene to another, feels out of place. Until, that is, the film stops these voyeuristic excursions, at which point the viewer wishes the camera would continue to exploit her rather that leave her trapped in an exquisite sorry sauce of weak writing that’s face-palmingly acted.
You might have noticed by now that I really haven’t given any synopsis of the movie’s plot. That’s because any attempt would require me to actually formulate the film’s content into a coherent sequence of shots that converge on a single point, from the vantage of which one might behold the grand struggle between Autobot and Decepticon in shimmering simplicity. In other words, I would need to actually write a script.
The sheer number of things in this movie, people, places, jokes, battles, gadgets and plot devices, that don’t fit together provides so much friction that even an corpse would shed a load for T3 as it continues its cinematic self-mutilation.
The movie feels like it’s 6 hours long, even though it’s closer to 3. In fact, if you have a hard time sitting that long for clusterf***s of Hollywood bulls***, I’d recommend just going in halfway through the movie. You will have missed nothing important, except a few character introductions, which are as painful for the audience as the actors wincing on screen.
So the plot is muddled, nonsensical, and completely arbitrary. Important characters are never developed, developed characters are never important, and the story which positions Chicago as ground-zero for the Decepticon invasion never gets off the ground and would give even the most rigid Autobot a serious case of titanium blue balls.
I would say avoid this film, but if for some reason you love watching trains crash, savoring the sight of charred victims stumbling through the wreckage of empty dreams and broken promises, then by all means see this movie. If not, you might be disappointed.
Score: 3.5/10