Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011)

There’s so many mind-crushing implausibilities and ridiculous wrong turns in Michael Bay’s overblown summer blockbuster “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” I could write for days and not scratch the surface of mess. Senseless side plots, useless red herrings, painful comedic stops into lunacy and gay rape jokes, the insistence on objectifying woman as machinery, and an orange-hued John Malkovich as an insipid boss are just some of the high-lowlights in this outing.

But they are not the WTF cherry bomb to any thinking person’s brain. That prize belongs to the sappy end credits song that takes us out the theater door after a 2 hour 35 minute extravaganza of CGI robot smack downs, ceaseless noise and slo-mo explosions. The offending tune is a light FM love tune from a gone-soft rock band named Linkin Park. “Iridescent” is the title, a song made for the “Twilight” crowd. That’s how Bay has you leave a film dedicated to hardware, guns and bombs that spends its last hour tearing Chicago apart block by block, skyscraper by skyscraper, reigning down fire, metal and devastation with ceaseless aplomb. Why not a Pink Floyd classic?

“Dark of the Moon” – I can’t read that without mentally inserting “Side” in the title, speaking of Pink Floyd -- is Bay’s third, longest and biggest film in the franchise about intergalactic robots with the capability to morph into trucks, cars and other objects, warring over the Earth.

Its reckless plot kick-starts with a cool stab of alternate history story-telling quite similar to the recent “X-Men: First Class.” Dig it: The U.S./Soviet race to the moon was a scam, a cover-up con. Why? An alien spaceship belonging to the Autobots – the good guy robots – crash landed on the moon in 1961. The Russians and Americans space raced each other to find the goods first. American won. (Or did they?) Now, the Decepticons -- the bad robots -- are betting that hidden goods at the moon wreckage will allow them to rule humankind.

So “Moon” boils down to the same plot as its predecessors: The bad guys covet a doohickeything that will allow them to rule humankind. Tractor-trailer morphing Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) and his Autobot pals are there to say, “I don’t think so,” snap a metal finger, and go guns blazing. As Autobot friend Sam Witwicky, Shia LaBeouf absolutely will run in slow-motion across a devastated city, and amid fire, rubble and magic-hour lighting, dismantle/knock over/destroy the doohickeything. He has done this twice before, Sam (Shia) repeats ad nauseam. Plot spolied? Spare me. This isn’t “Winter’s Bone.”

And now here’s where I admit what I cannot hide: I surrendered to Bay’s ear-grinding zooms and booms, and peel a layer off our eyeballs with million dollar CGI shots, and flag-waving bravado against a sunset.

The exact scene: A U.S. Special Forces unit jumps from an aircraft and glides into downtown Chicago. The soldiers soar like eagles amid explosions. We get a helmet cam view, close up and so real, vertigo hits. I gasped with glee. I should have gone 3D. I didn’t. My loss. Bay is just getting started, though.

Another one: In a scene that defies physics (logic died in the first film, did you miss that?), a massive boa constrictor-like Decepticon slithers up a skyscraper, and squeezes it, sending half the structure over on its side, crashing into other buildings. It’s a kick-ass “Holy shit!” scene that should win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

That out of the way, I can go back to the drubbing. Bay is incapable of making a subtle movie, or even a coherent movie, and most likely edits his film with a utility knife on the back of a Red Bull beverage dispenser, in the dark. More than a dozen characters and useless asides could have been cut with no consequence.

This third helping is leaps better than the awful second installment, yet it’s still far short of the first “Transformers.” That film had spark. Despite the handful of “wow” scenes that pulled me in here, the insanely long running time and frenzied high-on-glue pace of every single scene feels more akin to a sensory overload pummeling.

Malkovich, Frances McDormand and John Turturro all race to win a Golden Ham Award in supporting roles. Turturro wins by looking into the camera and laughing hysterically. LaBeouf plays a man as only a horny 12-year-old boy can imagine a man, he hangs out with robots and soldiers all day, has no job, and lives in a dream loft with a hot and always willing girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley taking over for Megan Fox in an interchangeable role).

LaBeouf irritates here more than he did in “Indiana Jones and the Bad Movie About the Alien Skulls,” a true feat, while Huntington-Whitley does what she is told, by Bay, which means pout lips, bend over, spread your legs when getting out of a car, you know, the kind of woman only a horny 12-year-old boy can imagine. or Bay. C+