"Transformers: Dark of the Moon"

Perhaps you know him best as the whimpery gay dude in rehab in the bizarre Sandra Bullock vehicle 28 Days? Perhaps you know him as the creepy murderer in television's messy yet underappreciated scifi body-swapper mystery "Dollhouse." Or maybe you know him most from the very best episodes of the very best TV show, "Strangers with Candy," when he played the leader of the cult that wanted to "sit at the welcome table." As Steve the Pirate in Dodgeball? That dude from "Firefly"? The pedophile on "CSI"? I would call him the man of a thousand faces but he really has just one face and it's magical! Oh, Alan Tudyk! His latest role is that of an insane and likely Austrian and definitely repressed computer hacker and reformed assassin and probable homosexual in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and he achieves the feat of being the one actor who openly mocks this hideous and outrageously expensive-looking film from within. YOU WIN, Alan Tudyk! You are the best.

And the competition is tough: there's a spray-tanned John Malkovich going real big; an absolutely bonkers physical comedy endurance routine from Ken Jeong; Frances McDormand vacillating between phone-in and terrifying commitment as a chief spook; a big and effortlessly campy John Turturro splatter-painting of a performance. That is a lot of actors trying things without much supervision and, to be fair, they're all winners in the losing battle of man versus machine.

You know that it goes without saying that this is a terrible movie. (And unlike MANY of you OTHER pretend film critics (ahem), I have indeed seen them all three Transformers movies. Not only that, I have seen the entirety of the monster bomb that was GI Joe, so I know where the baseline is.)

Knowing that, the point becomes: is this a movie that you can slip into and forget about your life for a few hours? The answer, happily, is "mostly yes."

There are the appearances of plot obstacles to be resolved. It's not all too confusing. The dialogue is jarring and nonsensical and very broad with lots of swearing, so it keeps you engaged and you forget that you're watching Hasbro toys. Shia Labeouf talks a lot. His girlfriend juts her parts as needed.

But on a scale of terribletude, it's really so much better than the other two Transformers movies! There is actually some attention paid to some visual staging and someone decided that there should be a story, and then made sure to express every nook and cranny of the story in real-time, and then helpfully gave us flashbacks to very slightly earlier in the movie! (Remember that part where humans went to the moon and found aliens, which was also the main point of the movie's trailer (and also THE SUBTITLE) which you have been shown 1000 times? Well JUST IN CASE you didn't remember the CENTRAL PREMISE OF THE MOVIE, here are some little flashbacks! That is unreal!)

And somehow still, there was a point at which I started working out a tax issue in my head and then came back when I remembered I was at a movie. So it's not a total success.

What I'll remember most about this final Transformers movie is that there were three different U.S. presidents in the film and somehow they couldn't find an actor who looked like Kennedy, Nixon or Obama. (This is Brett Stimely, the dude who played Kennedy. I mean, why not just pick any random white person off the street?) In a movie that is mostly made of pixels, that just seems impossible, or perhaps actively hostile.