Verdict: ★★ 1/2

Firstly, please… for the love of all that’s sacred… leave your toddlers with a sitter when you go see a PG-13 movie. Is that so hard to do? I have another option for you. It’s a little extreme. I don’t mean to offend anyone but you could always wait for the DVD! I know. I know! I maaaay have crossed a line suggesting that, but c’mon people. Cowboy up. There were two toddlers in the theater (two different sets of parents).Fuuuuuuuuu…!

Okay, where was I? (huffs) On with the review…
Michael Bay apparently lives in a world where every woman alive is barely legal, has tan legs, walks around with BFFs and wears the latest sexy Beverly Hills fashion while they look seductively at boys. That’s what almost every woman in this movie is portraying. Bay makes Transformer movies for adult men who’s inner teenage boys just hit puberty and it works because these movies do very well at the box office. Well, I mean, T1 did phenomenally well. T2 should never have existed. T3: Dark Side of the Moon kicked all kinds of ass due in large part to Leonard Nimoy’s involvement and now we have T3: Age of Extinction, a rather squirmworthy fourth installment of the Transformer canon.

Optimus Prime has gotten tired of starring in Michael Bay movies humans. The US Government and their politics, black ops, backwards morals and blind sheeple as its citizenry have even gotten the best of this patriotic leader, and the human race can kiss his gigantic blue mechanical ass. Apparently, because of the attack on Chicago in the third installment, ‘muricans have declared war on all transfomers and Optimus has taken a hell of a beating. There are special black operation CIA transformer hunters who do nothing but track down and kill Decepticons and Autobots alike swiftly and harshly. Add to that a strange just arrived transformer named Lockdown who’s history those of us that aren’t up to date on the comics, know anything about. He just appears with a big, city sized ship and walks around menacingly looking for Optimus to add to his “collection” of other caged transformers of repute.

Enter Mark Wahlberg, an oddly cast electronics nerd/engineer/inventor who’s built like a mack truck and who also builds robot dogs from scrap and electronic whirlygigs that do nothing special at all. His 17 year old daughter who wears cut offs with less fabric than French bikinis, even calls him a loser. He can’t pay bills, borrows money from friends and has no social skills. When out of the blue he runs across an old, beat up, bullet ridden, mortar shelled truck cab and takes it home to part it out for cash. He lights it up with a car battery and it suddenly transforms into a rather dazed and confused Optimus.

Wahlberg was a strange casting choice here. I love Marky Mark. He’s bad ass in just about anything he does, but in this one, he constantly flips from in yo’ face with a baseball bat to running and screaming like a little girl when the shit hits the fan, back to in yo’ face with an alien gun. Not really knowing if he’s supposed to be a nerdy inventor or a special forces warrior, he fights in some scenes and in other scenes he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off and it just doesn’t look right. I will say I liked Wahlberg a lot better than I liked LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf’s consistent hollering out pages from a legal encyclopedia and never shutting up was a little grating on my nerves and there are times when I wished he’d just die off so I can watch the Transformers just kick each other’s asses instead. Wahlberg is always a more grounded force in his movies and this one was no exception, even if the movie was scattered as it was.

Wahlberg aside, this movie is brimming with talent. John Goodman is the voice for Hound, an extremely “Murican” military transformer who speaks and acts like a gung-ho WWII soldier. Ken Wantanabe voices Drift, a peaceful samurai transformer. Kelsey Grammar plays an especially paranoid “agent” who relentlessly tracks down and destroys transformers “for God and Country”. Nicola Peltz plays Wahlberg’s daughter, who never takes her heels off in the Texas desert or in the middle of robot battlefields. And finally, Stanley effing Tucci, one of my all time favorite actors, takes John Turturro’s place as comic relief and he fills that role as only Stanley effing Tucci can! He’s serious in some places and hilariously wigs out in other places and he never makes it unbelievable. I love that guy.

A word about sidekicks… stick with one, will ya Mike Bay? A comedy sidekick is cool, so long as the jokes work with the movie. They didn’t. I mean, seriously… a surfer dude (complete with surfboard on the roof of his Mini Cooper) in Texas? And having him suddenly replaced with a more serious side kick with no comedy at all makes the movie drag its tailfin in the dirt before takeoff.

All that said, this movie did kind of work, sort of… in a roundabout way. The action was incredible, but honestly it was the same action as the first movie: robots rolling around on asphalt in slow motion, shouting and shooting giant guns throughout city streets with people screaming and running in all directions. It was just better CGI, that’s all. I thought I saw scenes from the first movie in this one, but don’t quote me.

Tell ya what. Just watch the first movie again and re-run the final action sequence an additional 20 minutes and you’ll pretty much have this movie. The story was smart… ish, but maybe it was too smart… ish for me because, amidst the French bikini cut offs, the constant robots fighting and explosions, I was lost the entire time about what was going on. Optimus is pissed off the entire time, random hottie in cut offs is leaning over something, black ops guys are chasing someone, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is checking the mail, Optimus is pissed off and fighting something, two random hotties in cut offs or short skirts are walking together down a sidewalk, summersaulting transformers are shooting guns, black ops guys are chasing someone else, ‘nother random hottie in cut offs is smiling and leaning over something…

There were more female legs than robots in this movie and that’s saying something! All in all, I’d say save your money and watch this one on HBO if you want to keep up with the movie canon. Not really worth the price of admission though.