Do you like Michael Bay movies? Not just merely tolerate Michael Bay, but LOVE him? Like you went to see Pearl Harbor, you can recite every line from Bad Boys 2, and the jive-talking robots in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen didn’t bother you THAT much? Did you watch his Victoria’s Secret commercial on repeat? These are the only questions you need to answer going into Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Because if you said ‘yes’ to any of the above, you will totally heart Dark of the Moon, a movie in which Bay confuses Shia LeBeouf’s fast-talking and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s lip pouting for character development and over-bloated Transformer history for a plot.

If you said ‘no’ to any of the above, well…the last hour of Dark of the Moon is still nonstop action and a pretty awesome spectacle, but mustering through the previous hour-and-a-half will be a long fought battle for you.

Read more after the jump!

Dark of the Moon opens with the space race to the moon after NASA detects something big crashing there in ’61. Unbeknownst to them, it’s an Autobot spacecraft carrying the one thing that could have saved the Autobots from the Decepticons during the epic battle for their home planet Cybertron. Flash forward 40 years later, and Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) is shacking up with his impossibly hot ladyfriend (Huntington-Whiteley) in an impossibly opulent house in downtown Washington, D.C. after graduating college and is in search of a dream job. Meanwhile the Autobots are off fighting for the U.S. when they discover a Decepticon at Chernobyl and embark to bring back the fallen spacecraft from the moon.  Of course there is some trickery and deception and a lot of robot battles.

And a lot of humans are involved this time around. Sam’s parents show up for some comic relief. Sam’s girlfriend stomps around in high heels and tight dresses and is given opulent car gifts from her shady boss (Patrick Dempsey). Frances McDormand pops up as a government official who may or may not know some secrets from the moon landing. John Malkovich is Sam’s asshole boss. John Turturro is back as a FBI robot expert, as are Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as soldiers. Even Ken Jeong shows up as a weird dude who shares some information with Sam that implies humans are more involved with Decepticons than meets the eye.

Whew. That’s a lot, no? It’s because Bay jam-packs so much "plot" into his overstuffed runtime that, at one point, I just sorta checked out and wondered, “when are we gonna see some fucking robots battle?”

And battle they do, thankfully. After sitting through all that “plot,” eye-rollingly awful one-liners, “character development,” and obnoxious tiny robots that get perilously close to Mater from Cars (aka the new Jar Jar Binks), Bay gives me what I want: a fantastically grandiose robot battle that involves office buildings crumbling and twisting sideways, soldiers paragliding through the air, and a metric shit ton of explosions. And in Bay’s gloriously shot 3D, it really is epically beautiful. It puts to shame any post-production 3D conversions and is totally worth the upsell.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is exactly what you expect it to be: over-the-top and slightly incoherent but chockfull of big, badass robots slamming into each other and popping heads off. And really, what more could you need?

--Darcie Duttweiler