For far too long, the movie consists of chase scenes, scrotum jokes, shrieked conversations, broad slapstick, and depressingly regressive ethnic caricatures. A good deal of time is also wasted on LaBeouf and dream-girl Megan Fox dickering over when he’ll finally say “I love you.” Which is an odd choice for a film otherwise once again pitched at 13-year-old boys, to whom fart jokes are always funny, all women below the age of 40 are apparently plasticine porn stars, and nothing’s cool unless it blows up—or better yet, in an unfortunate running gag, humps something else and then blows up. At least in the last half-hour, Bay’s incredibly sloppy continuity and overeager rush to action pays off, as he forgets the comic-relief characters, whisks past the story elements, and just gets down to a massive, eye-popping combat sequence that blows up everything in sight. Which is probably all anyone really wanted from Michael Bay’s Transformers in the first place. So why did it take nearly five hours of movie to get there?