I wasn’t a fan of Transformers. I hated Transformers 2.

And I really enjoyed Transformers 3.

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. The film still has the sniggling sense of humor of a 14 year old boy who thinks he’s really smart. In the first two films, these were the moments that distracted from the thin ideas of the screenplays and the limitations of the giant f***ing robots (as Par promoted the first 2 films at ComicCon).

Here, Bay parodies himself by introducing a new character with a virtual Victoria’s Secret ad, bores us with our hero being stuck looking for work, and plays the parent joke a little too hard.

I imagine Bay either snorting as he giggles at these jokes as though he was a child or seriously discussing what a 14-year-old boy would find funny. Either way, it can be embarrassing. Bay should screen the film for Adam Sandler and anything that is too broad for Adam should be cut. And 25% would be cut. Then show it to Albert Brooks and cut a third of the jokes he think should be cut. That would put you at about 50% of the attempted comedy. Then tighten and you are probably just about right.

I did think the world might actually implode if you put The Johns (Malkovich and Turturro) in a scene together with the only goal being to eat more scenery than the Deceptacon snake thing eats Chicago pavement. Sadly, it wasn’t very funny. Malkovich is shot like a Martin Schoeller portrait by way of David La Chappelle, all teeth, eyes, greased hair, and over-tanned skin. That IS funny… but like everything else about the humor in this film, it is played waaaaay too long to sustain a meta joke. Even Julie White suffers from too much screen time this time. Frances McDormand joins Johnny Mac in slumming for dollars. (Alan Tudyk kills.)

This is pretty much the entire bad part of the film. It wastes for over 30 minutes of the running time, so it can be frustrating. But Bay moves between the unfunny attempts at being funny and the action quickly enough to keep it from dragging the enterprise down.

The good news… lots of it… for a Transformer movie

Impactful 3D becomes more of a cameo player as the moves along, but smartly, Bay maximizes it in the first 20 minutes. (It’s a weird summer. Tr3 reflects X4 by attaching itself to a real 1960s event. And Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, which I saw just the night before, also uses a period set-up before the movie, set in “today” starts.) I thought the moon sequence used 3D as well as I have seen it used in any film since Avatar. Maybe even better than Avatar. Bay managed to make mundane images pop in 3D in a way I have never seen. (Set design is a big part of it.)

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is beautiful and competent as the female lead. Shes not an actress, but neither was Megan Fox. And whatever the role was when Fox was still associated with the project, the role as it stands in the movie fits H-W and is unimaginable in Fox’s hands. It’s not hard to come up with the tweaks that would make the girl lead more of a smart-ass, short-shorted tease. But what’s interesting in Huntington-Whiteley is that she has a presence that allows us to believe that every man in the film wants to sex her, but that she is so comfortable with dumb male objectification, she would be emotionally loyal to her man, in spite of his obvious flaws, because s she is confident in her choices. (More than he is.) Fox’s character seemed more of a natural mercenary.

But it’s the shift in the primary idea of the film that makes the greatest impact. This is, primarily,a war film, not an effects film. And while I’m sure the budget was incrementally higher (a 15% incremental growth in budget = over $30 million), it feels as though the technology costs much have dropped exponentially. Basically, it feels, for the first time, like Bay was able to use as much robot footage as he wanted. I’m sure, in real life, he wanted more… but I’m saying the movie doesn’t feel like it ever has to choose not to use a bot when it might fit the story. The bots, good and bad, are now like actors. There is as much literal scenery chewing as actor scenery chewing in a film in which the director seems to ask the actors to get on the scenery, dry hump it, and then gnaw on it until their teeth bleed.

Truth is, the robot stuff has gotten so strong that the overreaches by the actors – especially Shia in action scenes – really stand out. When SLB bounces over cars and then under a car, etc, I disconnected a little. But I was completely ready for the autobots to fulfill the roles that we are used to seeing actors fill in action movie and westerns. There is a line – which I won’t offer here – from Optimus Prime that gives the audience a giddy chill as though it was said by Eastwood or Schwarzenegger or Stallone in years past.

And again, thematically, the stakes here are simplified and amplified. It’s a variation on ID4 and Mars Attacks, basically. Human kind is seriously threatened and must team with technology to save itself. They get the balance of human and bot heroism just about right. (There’s even make up for the racism of Transformers 2, with more black heroics… never screaming “see, we’re not racist,” but well done.)

There is even, on top of a lot more bots, some stuff we really haven’t seen before, as Bay takes on Cameron and Nolan with a building reminiscent of The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, True Lies, and a touch of Inception.

Yes, there are a million things you can yank out of the fabric of this film to complain about. Why is the entire earth centered in 8 blocks of Chicago? Because it’s a movie. But there is also a great benefit in this seeming simplicity… we know where we are in the 30+ minutes we spend in the space.

If you cut 30 minutes or so of Bay’s darlings – mostly human ones – this would be a much better movie. (You really could cut the entire Malkovich section of the film.) And you can linger on what other directors could have done more with this material. But you know, this is the first time the movie works well enough that I even considered whether Spielberg’s humanity or Nolan’s dryness or Greengrass’ realistic heroes would be better in this bot environment. This is a big step up for the series.

I enjoyed the film in the most big summer boom boom way. I would go again. And I would go to see it in 3D again.

And Transformers 4 could be the best of all. 110 minutes max… classic movie structure… great, seamless effects… 5 good laughs and no swinging for the comedy fences… I would really be looking forward to it.

But for now, we won’t see any better fireworks show this summer. Enjoy it. It’s the Transformers movie that we always wanted them to make.