Mega-budget schlock director Michael Bay re-imagines the space race and historic moon landing not as products of a Cold War pissing contest, but rather a military mission to investigate the crash landing of an alien ship. That’s the lone decent idea in this otherwise formulaic and tedious sequel, which once again finds the good-guy extraterrestrial robots, the Autobots, pitted against the evil Decepticons in a battle to save humans, machines and Shia LaBeouf’s love life. In typical Bay fashion, the action sequences are incoherent, the plot is nonsense and the only noteworthy acting achievement is Rosie Huntington-Whitely, replacing Megan Fox as LaBeouf’s squeeze and designated distressed damsel, somehow out-cyphering her predecessor. A movie where every shot looks like it cost millions of dollars shouldn’t be this numbingly dull. –Matt Semansky