Here’s the good news: Transformers: Dark of the Moon is nowhere near as awful as 2009’s aneurysm-inducing Revenge of the Fallen. Too bad Dark of the Moon isn’t exactly a good movie, either. Sure, the plot hangs together better than either of the previous Transformer movies, and director Michael Bay has finally figured out how to make his onscreen orgy of metallic chaos at least partially understandable to the viewer (more on this in a second). But in the end we’re left with an agonizingly long (154 minutes), loud and laughable blockbuster that seems designed specifically to appeal to viewers aged 12 and under.
Dark of the Moon opens with a 10-minute prologue that casts NASA’s moon missions in a whole new light. Bay splices together archival footage (somewhere, Walter Cronkite is weeping) with freshly shot 3D material in his usual slapdash, shaky-cam, rapid-fire manner, and for a second I thought vertigo was going to have me blowing chunks right in the aisle. But someone (Cameron? Spielberg?) must have told Bay that his usual face-in-a-blender style of filmmaking wasn’t going to work in 3D, and the director slows down the cuts and allows his camera to linger for more than a second or two. Sure, the assault ramps up in the last hour, but Dark of the Moon makes visual sense in a way the earlier films did not. Credit the 3D presentation, which is impressive and the best since Avatar.
The plot (such as it is) is a standard aliens-invading-earth yarn, with some inside baseball about the Transformer’s home planet thrown in for fans of the series. Essentially, you get 90 minutes of setup that introduces new human characters (Frances McDormand’s head of national intelligence, Patrick Dempsey’s smarmy Decepticon sympathizer, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s vapid placeholder for an actual female character) and new robots (the Leonard Nimoy-voiced Sentinel Prime) before going guns a-blazin’ for an hour-long invasion of Chicago that features some spectacular (and spectacularly silly) action beats.
Look, I could nitpick Dark of the Moon to death, but who cares? The Transformers franchise has always been the cinematic equivalent of staring into a roman candle and letting the fireballs of colored light repeatedly hit you in the face, and with this latest (last?) installment Bay and co. have assembled their biggest, most elaborate firework to date. And over the Fourth of July holiday, it’s the guy with the biggest fireworks display that wins, right? Just don’t be surprised if your vision is still fuzzy the next day.
Positioned as a grown-up antidote to the walking toy commercial that is Transformers, Larry Crowne is a breezy wisp of a movie that will leave only the coldest and most cynical among us unsmiling. Hollywood everyman Tom Hanks jumps into the director’s chair for the first time since his 1996 debut That Thing You Do, and once again shows that he can connect with an audience from before and behind the camera.
Hanks plays the titular character, a 20-year Navy man who skipped college for the high seas and ended up on the big-box store hamster wheel after leaving the service. Despite being Employee of the Month nine times, Larry gets the boot from corporate lackeys because they have to cut someone and he lacks a degree. What’s the poor sap to do? Go back to school, of course.
Larry enrolls in community college, trades his gas-guzzling SUV for a garage-sale scooter and heads to class. On the first day he meets the fetching Talia (relative newcomer Gugu Mbatha-Raw, in what should be a star-making performance), a free spirit who runs with a “gang” of fellow Vespa jockeys nominally led by her boyfriend (That ’70s Show’s Wilmer Valderrama). Talia and her pals show Larry the ropes, give him a makeover, adjust his house for maximum feng shui, and set him on the path to happiness. You sense that all he lacks is a mate, and with Julia Roberts teaching his public speaking class, he doesn’t have to look far.
Roberts’ character is more than a one-dimensional love interest, though. She’s unhappily married to a serial porno hound (he used to be a writer and professor, before they got a computer, I guess) and working on drinking herself into a stupor. Early in the film she’s bitter and frumpy, but as she gets to know Crowne and he earns her trust, romance is clearly in the offing. As are some funny classroom scenes involving impromptu speeches about French toast and Star Trek.
Despite toying with familiar aspects of The Great Recession (job loss, unemployment, foreclosure) and the mid-life crisis in general, Larry Crowne never goes very dark or deep, and the film seems content to be nothing more than a well-told, entertaining love story aimed at people over 18 years of age. And as such, it’s a delight.
This article appears in Jun 30 – Jul 6, 2011.