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!
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