Rated PG-13

You know that one horrible neighborhood kid who would come over uninvited and gleefully, inexplicably smash every toy in your sandbox while you watched on, powerless to stop him? Michael Bay is that kid. 

The Transformers, as you know, were once toys, amusing little plastic thingamabobs, fascinating little puzzles that begged to be solved and played with. They had character. They were engaging. They were fun. Then Bay comes around the corner, twists their arms off, lights them on fire, and beats every last joy out of them.

 To state that Bay’s third chapter of the Transformers screen series is not good is simply not statement enough. It is most certainly bad. But bad movies happen every day. The road to a good movie is an understandably difficult one, requiring the balance of a dozen different art forms—writing, acting, production design, cinematography, music and editing among them—and the breakdown of any can threaten to scuttle even the best efforts of all the rest. The first problem with “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is that every single one of these elements fails. 

Under Bay’s frenzied, over-caffeinated direction, the movie aggressively defies even the most basic vocabulary of cinema as it has come to be recognized over the last century. It careens wildly and noisily from scene to scene, leaping across continents (and, at least once, across light years of interstellar space) without the barest hint of connective tissue, and frequently making similarly preposterous, head-spinning leaps of illogic in dialogue. The story features a host of loathsome characters, not one of whom is remotely realistic, let alone relatable. One wonders what envious vendetta Bay must have against the Coen Brothers to make him cast three accomplished veterans from their stable, John Turturro, John Malkovich and Francis McDormand, in the shoes of characters thinner than the napkins they were written on. 

Foremost among those characters is Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, who returns apparently having spent the interval since “Transformers 2” learning to be a petulant, resentful, self-pitying little snot. Sam spends a lot of time shouting and scolding people and pounding his steering wheel, maddened apparently by the fact that world-saving doesn’t add up to much on a résumé or pay his half of the rent. Ignoring all tenets of focus or pace, Bay spends nearly the whole first hour of the flick following Sam’s drudging, angry quest to land a job, of all mundanities, as well as his occasional jealous rage-fits over his conspicuously wonder-hot girlfriend (the eye candy position previously held by bad-girl brunette Megan Fox, here replaced with subservient Victoria Secret model and distinctly non-actress Rosie Huntington-Whitely). 

The movie is very much like the robots on screen: a massive, thunderous, stupefyingly overcomplicated tangle of grinding metal, which, through incomprehensible machinations, manages to take on the most tiresome of possible forms. 

But the deeper issue here, and the one that sets this film apart from other multiplex atrocities, may be the various subtexts Bay buries in the little details (and yes, even Michael Bay is capable, disturbingly enough, of subtext). The “good guys’” mission to murder a bunch of nameless Arabs, for example. Or the depiction of Russian scientists as dangerously inept, backstabbing traitors. Or Bay’s insistence on portraying every single Autobot as comic relief simply by voicing them in various ethnic accents (with the notable exception of their leader Optimus Prime, who platitudes his way through the dialogue in a rumbling Midwestern burr.) Or the explicit, lingering slo-mo used to explore the anatomy of his vacuous female lead. Or the jets of vivid red fluid that spray out as the robots wrench off each other’s extremities (since when did these machines start to bleed?). Or the clear joy he levies on the repeated shots of innocent human bodies being Holocausted into smithereens as the Decepticon armada (which appears from where? It’s never made clear) inexplicably decimates downtown Chicago in the film’s final three reels. 

A reminder now: its PG-13 rating notwithstanding, this movie is aimed squarely, obviously at pre-adolescent American males. 

In the name of Hasbro Toys, Michael Bay has managed with stunning efficacy to celebrate, even fetishize, physical brutality, male aggression, female objectification, bigotry, vice, cultural ignorance, historical revisionism, Patriot Act xenophobia and genocide and to wrap it up in bright Happy Meal colors just for our impressionable young to gobble down. Under his direction, the innocent little robot champions of yore have been made to represent all that is worst not only in filmmaking and American culture, but possibly in human nature itself. 

There may be a hell of a lot more bad movies out there than good ones, but every now and again one comes along that transcends common badness to become actual evil. Not to get too preachy, but as a nation, we might reconsider who we’re allowing to play in our children’s sandboxes. It’s not just the toys that are at risk.