“TRANSFORMERS 3” SHOWS TWISTED METTLE

TRANSFORMERS 3
Starring Shia LaBeouf,
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley,
Josh Duhamel,
John Turturro,
Patrick Dempsey,
Frances McDormand,
Tyrese Gibson,
Kevin Dunn,
Julie White,
John Malkovich
Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Ehren Kruger
Running time 157 mins.
Rated PG-13

Hasbro.

Can we really watch a movie made in association with...Hasbro?
It’s like one made in partnership with Minute Rice or Del Monte. It feels wrong. Like we’re stupid for getting all jacked about the little 80s toy movie. Let no one forget, Bob Hoskins’ one regret: “Super Mario Brothers.”

That said, “Transformers 3” is what it is, and the filmmakers do a pretty good job of helping us forget that by putting it in 3D. In the same way that after watching “The Matrix” you might see, as you leave the theater, people holding kicks in mid-air while your mental camera spins around them, you might leave the third “Transformers” seeing giant twisting metal worms tearing through skyscrapers. Always a plus.

Upshot: Giant space robots, a “race” called Autobots, are pals with scrappy young Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf), and include him in their mighty battles with bad giant robots called Decepticons, who want to take over the planet. Meanwhile, scrappy young Witwicky has a super hot British girlfriend (Huntington-Whiteley), and she works for a smug privileged fellow (Dempsey) who poses a threat for Sam.

What makes this third installment different from the other two is the attempt to reinvent it as a legitimate science fiction film, involving President Kennedy and imagining the real reason for the 60s space race being a Transformer spaceship called the Ark crash-landing on the dark side of the moon.
That kind of effort does raise the bar. Probably this third one is the best of the franchise. But it’s not without its problems.

Hasbro. It’s not a help that the giants look like toys. And that their voices are cutesy. Cockney-talkin’ robots? Plus a couple little robots that act extra silly? The filmmakers definitely bring in the Ewoks, just like twice before.

Strangely, all of the robots don’t speak anything but English, and none of them with a female voice. One of the robots can talk only by threading together quotes from movies–just the gender-specific ones in English. Doesn’t seem like the robots come from deep space when their means of communication is so narrowly limited. But that’s “Transformers” for you. It is what it is.

Two hours and thirty-seven minutes, for one thing. Either a major plus or a major minus, depending on how you look at it. I think they could’ve edited under two hours easy. The story goes off in a lot of different directions, focusing on sundry extraneous and distracting threads featuring terrific talent in John Turturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich, all miscast, as far as I’m concerned, by being too talented for the material.

Just think. This proves that the filmmakers could get Maya Angelou to write the screenplay for “Cabbage Patch Kids–The Movie,” starring every living human being who ever won an Oscar, and utilizing the greatest possible computer animation skills available on the planet, all pushed with the most massive marketing campaign in the history of coin, and actually, that doesn’t sound too bad. Strong potential, really.

Now if we can just make it in hologram format....