Someone’s probably already written a doctoral thesis about how Hollywood action movies -- with their oiled muscles, bombastic explosions, and big, big guns -- are all about male performance anxiety. But I can't think of a film quite so vividly about the Problem in Daddy’s Pants as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."
From the obsession with sleek, gleaming cars of various eras to the dildo-shaped weaponry that everyone’s chasing after to the vagina-dentata robot that’s basically a big opening lined with spinning rows of blades to the way the camera all but date-rapes model-turned-“actress” Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, one feels compelled to give screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Michael Bay a reassuring pat on the back while whispering, “It’s OK, it happens to everybody.”
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Heck, the movie even starts with hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) whining about the fact that he’s living off the generosity of his girlfriend Carly (Huntington-Whiteley) because he can’t find a job, even after saving the world twice and earning a hero’s medal from the president.
And “whining” isn’t an overstatement -- Sam literally mewls like a petulant schoolgirl over the fact that his good buddies, the Autobots, are out on missions for the government while he schleps around in an old beater going on pointless job interviews.
When Sam finally gets hired by aerospace industrialist Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich, sporting a silver mane and an orange tan), he soon finds himself plunged back into the action.
Back in the early ’60s, you see, an Autobot escaped the war with the evil Decepticons, carrying a weapon that might have turned the tide, but unfortunately he crashed on the dark side of the moon. The entire Apollo program turns out to be an elaborate ruse staged solely for the purpose of doing recon on the crash. (Buzz Aldrin, for unfathomable reasons, pops up as himself.)
And then … look, just trying to think about the plot is making my "Transformers" headache come back. Suffice it to say that there’s double-crossing, and clanky robot battles, and inappropriately phallic weaponry, and the destruction of Chicago, and traitorous humans, and the spectacle of Shia LaBeouf getting all teary when it looks like a bad robot is going to execute Bumblebee, the nice robot.
"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" relies on director Bay’s usual jumbling of images and soundtrack bombardment, but while it’s headache-inducing, that’s at least a slight improvement over the migraine machine that was "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Kudos to Kruger for creating a plot which, moronic though it is, at least makes some level of sense and strives to be a little more ambitious than “go to the place and get the thing.”
And "Dark of the Moon" is not without its occasional moments of pleasure, most notably watching real actors like Malkovich, Frances McDormand (as a no-nonsense intelligence chief), John Turturro (reprising his ridiculous role as a paranoid former agent) and Alan Tudyk (as Turturro’s Dutch sidekick) overact with the glee of movie stars slumming on the old Batman TV show.
