TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (Michael Bay). 157 minutes. Now playing. See listing. Rating: NNN
It’s taken him three tries, but Michael Bay has finally made a decent movie out of the Transformers.
After the incomprehensible visual torrent of the second film, Revenge Of The Fallen – which I remember as little more than a whirlwind of mecha CGI, except for that one unsettling close-up of John Turturro’s ass – Bay and his digital legions have retreated, regrouped and delivered Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, a giant-robot punch-up that’s visually inventive, spatially coherent and occasionally even funny.
At over two and a half hours, it’s still way too long, and Bay remains distressingly indifferent to the body count of his films. (Thousands of people die in the course of this movie, several of them right in our faces, thanks to the miracle of 3-D.)
And the plot is kind of ridiculous, revolving around the secrets of a decades-old Autobot ship on the moon that turns out to be the reason the American space program was initiated and ultimately lands Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his new girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, replacing a disappeared Megan Fox) smack in the middle of a destroyed Chicago, trying to save the Earth from the mother of all Decepticon schemes.
But this time around, it’s mostly not stupid. The action sequences are impressively assembled – the multi-stage free fall through a teetering skyscraper is genuinely thrilling – and this Transformers movie gets laughs on purpose, letting Turturro and newcomers Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Ken Jeong and the invaluable Alan Tudyk goof around in the margins of the frame.
Honestly, I’m as surprised as you are. I’ve spent the last week actively dreading the advent of a new Transformers movie. But fair is fair: this one’s not bad.
