Transformers 3

It's a perverse pleasure to watch an atrocious blockbuster. Sadly, Dark Side of the Moon, the third Transformers travesty from producer-director Michael Bay, is not bad enough to be a cult hoot. It's merely a compendium of many of the worst features of Hollywood commercialism, of which Bay is a shining example of wanton wastefulness of massive funds and mighty technical skills.

Stephen Spielberg's association with the Hasbro toymaker's mindless franchise, as its lead producer (through Dreamworks), demeans a director who used to have creative skills and artistry as well as money-making ambitions.

Any franchise that features an actor as stunted in physique and talent as Shia LaBeouf to portray its lead human character is obviously designed to be a live-action cartoon. LaBeouf, who once again shouts, screeches and kvetches tediously, has the charisma of a half-defrosted chicken corpse.

His adolescent unattractiveness was partly excusable the first time round (in 2007) when his parents were introduced. They are a stereotypical pair of hicks presumably intended to appeal to male movie-going US teenagers' hatred of loud-mouthed, pushy and stupid parents. The third time round, when they and LaBeouf are still pretending that he's teen-aged, their fake affability and crude jokes are as funny as suppurating warts. It is not surprising that LaBeouf never thinks about them after shooing them out of Chicago before the bad machine aliens invade it.

Bay has never treated women characters with delicacy either. Megan Fox's derriere and luscious lips have been replaced by an English model's ultra-long legs and lips that may be puff pieces for Botox. She is an inadequate actress, starring (like a plastic lamp might) in her first movie because she'd previously worked with Bay on his advertising films for Victoria's Secret, which employed her as its lead model. Other models have made acceptable transitions to film sets, but this woman's facial resemblance to Cameron Diaz was no guarantee that she could match that super-model's acting ability and charisma. She can't even disguise her English accent.

It's amazing that Sino-Americans have not yet mounted street demos protesting the portrayal of a bespectacled, nerdish, cliche-ridden Chinese rocket scientist as a despicably risible lavatorial idiot. There is also a ludicrous Germanic character, with a lousy accent, camp gestures and vacant expression.

A handful of normally good actors must have been paid good money to squander their talents as other cardboard figures propping up pathetic storylines. John Malkovich, John Turturro (masochistically returning to the franchise) and Frances McDormand might have provided light comic relief if they had been given dialogue and antics worthy of raising a smile, even a simper.

Which leads us to the principal cause of the movie's awfulness: the one credited writer, Ehren Kruger. He shared a Razzie for Worst Writing with the two co-contributors of the second (2009) Transformers screenplay, and can look forward to winning it all by himself for his latest effort. His movie career began in 1999 with the screenplay for Arlington Road, and has gone downhill ever since (most disappointingly for what he single-handedly wrote for Terry Gilliam's dire The Brothers Grimm).

It's troubling to ponder how talents as mediocre as his and Bay's get employed by Hollywood power-brokers. Bay made his mark as a director of fast-paced commercials and music videos, learned some dark arts of Hollywood with mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and is clearly now an experienced impresario of sound and visual effects. Some critics claim that his usage of 3D cameras for this film is as skilled as James Cameron's pioneering work with them on Avatar. That's a small justification for churning out clunking cinematic garbage in which automotive monsters are indistinguishable CGI cartoon figures, humans are characterless caricatures, and overloud surroundsound comprises grossly irrelevant song tracks, funereal choruses, mechanical drumming and mind-numbing explosions.

Bad enough to despise, not good enough to guffaw at, it's a movie that insults its audiences and helps to perpetuate their belief that Hollywood is sick at heart and in its communal brain.