Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a loud, large action flick featuring single-string characters saving the world from awesome death and destruction. Made in a bloated budget to accommodate 3D film-making, films such as these barely scrape up enough intelligence to outwit a dodo bird.

So it goes here that cars burn rubber and cartwheel around and over human traffic — in Michael Bay’s trademark slow motion. They collide, ricochet, transform into humanoid forms and die spitting sparks and blood.

Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBouf) is in the middle of Earth’s life-or-death tussle that plays as an extension of Autobots and Decepticons eons-long war. Dark of the Moon sees their brawl (and an earthworm-like robot) ravage the city of Chicago in a 50-minute spectacle. By the final frame, Bay wraps up the franchise for good.

The new robot-of-the-hour is Sentinel Prime (voiced by Transformer alumni Leonard Nimoy) whose excavation, rebooting and survival plays an important part for the first and second act of Dark of the Moon. Very much like X-Men: First Class, where we learned that the Cuban missile crisis was the work of mutant suggestion, Dark of the Moon tells us that the space race was the result of someone pressing the panic button because an alien spaceship crashed on the surface of the moon. Some 40-odd years later, the spacecraft dubbed Ark by Optimus Prime, is still on the moon.

Contradictory to a slew of mediocre-to-bad reviews, this is perhaps the best Transformers film to date. Just look past the potholes as one-dimensional characters disappear without a trace and Bay drives forward with a total disregard for any emotional connectivity.

Even the ravishing Rosie Huntington Whiteley (Sam’s new girlfriend after Megan Fox was booted from the franchise), who’s rationed a decent enough screen time, is nothing more than a stick figure. The same ideology applies to series regular action men Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

Released by Paramount Pictures (in association with Hasbro), Transformers: Dark of the Moon is rated PG-13.