Transformers

Much like its animated forebears, Michael Bay's Transformers functions as an extended advert for action figures. Since Bay is such an accomplished hyper-tasker, the film finds time to promote the ailing fortunes of the floundering General Motors while also serving as a hot-blooded recruitment drive for the various arms of the American military industrial complex. Tutored at the heel of 80s cocaine guzzlers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, Bay's response to the underdeveloped blockbuster writing beget by all this advertising is to insert on-the-fly snicker prompts.

It's as if the director anticipates a disengaged, grumbling audience. Zone out during that exposition? Here's a dick gag to keep you blinking. Acting is likewise affected, the mood stays manic and indulgent throughout. Bay's idea of character development is a Saturday Night Live aside that has already ran on two minutes too long. Shia LaBeouf's calamitous, mugging entrance has Megan Fox rolling her eyes into the ground. Yes. That's your leading man.

Marrying an 80s boy's toy franchise to a Terminator 2: Judgment Day style chase adds up, but the anxiety and threat required to meet that potential is undermined by the incessant non-sequitur and the prolonged absence of any peril generating robots. Presented as an interchangeable mass of evil, the Decepticons lack distinct personalities - each individual's acts build, anonymously, into a wider sense of antagonism, but no real characteristics emerge. We never settle on one memorable player. They're all just gun metal titans firing blindly.

Arch-foe Megatron, the crux of all transformer conflict, is relegated to a marginal amount of screen-time in the third act. Freshly thawed from an icy slumber, he contents himself zipping about as an alien jet screaming his name at the bemused humans. Unfortunately these transformers are little more than a series of indistinguishable ILM tech-demos. Special effects sequences rather than clashing, mobbing dispositions. That said, the Decepticons do provide Transformers' most indelible moments - street-level glimpses of flight-bots Starscream and Blackout rapidly reconfiguring then peeling away, towards the horizon, are brief joys in this vapid whole.