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Yet they don't make the film any better, and you know there's a problem when you find yourself thinking, "Bill O'Reilly, even you're too good for this, and I'm pretty sure you were sent here by the Devil." This is largely because at the center of the film is Shia LaBeouf, the least charismatic leading actor in the history of cinema, though this time around his performance is livelier than usual, in that he spends most of it screaming out of anger and frustration, rather than simpering and running around. It's hard to tell if that change was in the script, or if he was slowly realizing what a mess he had made of his life and had a real-life breakdown on screen. Watching LaBeouf stumble and scream his way through the film is the cinematic equivalent of being seated next to the guy who talks to his own nail clippings on the bus.

Not only is LaBeouf a black hole into which all fun, life and hope is sucked, but he's teamed up with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a model who's so vacant you'd be forgiven for thinking that she had been replaced by a wipe-clean sex doll in some scenes. Then again, at least the sex doll would have been able to convey shock and surprise more convincingly. The film is so brazen about its attitude towards Huntington-Whiteley's character - that she is there just to look nice in not very much - that the first shot of the film after the prologue is a long tracking shot of her ass as she walks up some stairs in the hilariously over-sized apartment she shares with LaBeouf. On top of that, within minutes of that a small, annoying Transformer walks through her legs and stares up her skirt, after which we are informed he was apparently caught going through her underwear days before, then he talks about how much he didn't like Sam's old girlfriend (i.e. Megan Fox). It's nice of Michael Bay to include a surrogate for himself in the film. Real artistic and shit.

However, it would be remiss of me to forget to say at this point that Alan Tudyk is pretty fun as Dutch, an ex-CIA operative and espionage genius who occasionally has psychotic breaks. If anyone ever made a spin-off just about the wacky adventures that Dutch gets up to whenever the giant robots aren't around I would be there opening day.

You know, for a film that's about giant robots fighting...

Now, I have been pretty negative about Transformers: Dark of the Moon up until this point, and defenders of the film usually take umbrage at this, because nothing threatens their sense of self-worth more than someone trashing a movie they like about fictional metal men. The typical response to any criticism of Bay's Transformers series is that they're just films about robots fighting each other, and that they aren't meant to be taken seriously.

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