Funny that should be the case, because the film started off as his story. LaBeouf is the Harry Potter of the machine world who is the unwitting nemesis of some evil alien machine thing. His Dumbeldore (saviour) is a huge, shape-shifting machine who drops dead within the first fifteen minutes of the film (Half Blood Prince anyone?). Now LaBeouf has to travel half-way acroos the world to resurrect the Dumbeldore fella (errm thing). But his girlfriend joins him in this perilous journey and thereon the film stops being about him. It’s a gleaming, throbbing, heaving Megan all the way.

Director Micheal Bay has shown in the first installment of the film that he loves to sprinkle his action monstrosities with humor, But should he really bother? Much of the running time is wasted to establish some elaborate and offensive visual puns (things that involve balls and pelvic thrusts) which only add flab to this exceptionally long close-to-three-hour film. He also tries to make comedians out of the Autobots (the good Transformers) making them cool Afro-American slang, but ends up making irritating caricatures out of them. When Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator spouted lines like “Hasta la vista, baby,” it worked because it was part of a larger effort to humanize the cyborg and make him fully a part of the family he was protecting; when Bay does it, it’s a momentary diversion that will be quickly lost once things start exploding.