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Two out of Five stars
Running time: 157 mins

The Transformers threequel has a handful of decent action sequences and is unlikely to disappoint fans of the franchise, but it's also frequently dull and suffers from the usual deficiencies in plot, tension, dialogue, character development and humour.

What's it all about?
Directed by Michael Bay, Transformers: Dark of the Moon (in 3D) is the third instalment in the Transformers franchise. It opens in the 1960s, when a Cybertronian ship crash lands on the Moon and secretly ignites the Space Race, with the Americans looting the ship of some mysterious pillars when they get there first.

Fast-forward to the present and professional robot friend Sam (Shia LaBeouf) and his smoking hot new girlfriend (Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley, replacing Megan Fox) once more find themselves in the middle of a giant robot smackdown as the Autobots and the Decepticons discover the truth about the Cybertronian ship and race to retrieve its contents. However, the ship's cargo includes Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy), who warns that the pillars must not be allowed to fall into the Decepticons' robot hands.

The Good
Needless to say, everything is bigger and louder this time round, with even more robots to keep track of, the usual jaw dropping special effects and some mostly impressive 3D work thrown into the mix. There are, to be fair, a handful of decent action scenes, most notably a bit where Bumblebee transforms around a mid-air Sam and an extended sequence set in a sliced-in-half skyscraper.

In addition, Rosie's pout looks quite fetching in 3D and Nimoy proves an excellent choice for the voice of Sentinel Prime, even if the script rather overdoes the Star Trek references.

The Bad
That said, Bay clearly hasn't learned any of the lessons from the previous films: it's still occasionally difficult to tell the good robots from the bad robots (a four-way stand-off in particular), the humour is juvenile at best (e.g. a tiny robot confessing to rifling through Rosie's underwear), the plot is both jingoistic and borderline offensive and there's no sense of tension or danger in the action scenes because it's impossible to care about any of the painfully under-developed characters.

On top of that, LaBeouf is as shrill and annoying as ever, Huntingdon-Whiteley's acting is laugh-out-loud terrible and the film completely wastes the likes of John Malkovich and Ken Jeong. It's also at least sixty minutes too long with an extremely boring middle hour.

Worth seeing?
If all you want from Transformers 3 is to watch robots fighting for two and a half hours then you won't be disappointed, but the film is completely devoid of tension, character development, humour and anything resembling human emotion. A bit like a robot, in fact.