D

The title may be “Transformers,” but “Dark of the Moon,” the third installment of the Michael Bay franchise based on the Hasbro action figures, is just more of the same—except for the subtraction of Megan Fox and the addition of 3D, which hardly seems a fair swap, although to be fair Bay has added a Fox substitute in Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a tall, svelte, blonde British model who’s unaccountably become the new girlfriend of brash but supposedly lovable series hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf).

Witwicky, now an unemployed college grad looking for work, he gets a job (unfortunately sans pay) without even applying for it—once again fighting the evil Decepticons in concert with his old pals, the good Autobots led by Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen). He’s drawn into this latest (and one hopes final) chapter in the endless war between the opposing armies of clunking aliens when the long-unnoticed wreckage of an Autobot ship is discovered on the far side of the moon and investigated by the Apollo 11 mission.

This is the second summer sci-fi behemoth—following the “X-Men: First Class” revisionism on the Cuban Missile Crisis—that rewrite American history to suit its purposes. Here President Kennedy’s call for the manned moon landing is presented merely as a pretext to beat the Russkis to the craft and check it out stealthily. The fifty-year-old find become the basis for contemporary conflict when Optimus Prime learns of the vessel’s presence and rescues his predecessor and mentor Sentinel Prime (Leonard Nimoy) from his long dormancy in it. Unfortunately, that acts as the catalyst for the evil Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugo Weaving) to launch his plan to destroy the Autobots and enslave humanity—in which he has a new henchman, the snakelike Shockwave (Frank Welker).

The contortions of Magatron’s scheme are so silly that there’s little point in trying to unravel them. Suffice it to say that, after a stop in Washington to destroy a national moment (a requirement in all pictures like this since “Independence Day”—in this instance it’s the Lincoln Memorial), it al winds up with the Decepticons in control of a devastated Chicago as ground zero of Megatron’s hostile takeover of the planet, and Sam and his comrades-in-arms, both the Autobots and humans Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and ex-Sergeant Epps (Tyrese Gibson), inside the city attempting to derail the plot. It’s personal for Sam, too, since his girlfriend Carly (Huntington-Whiteley) is trapped in a Windy City skyscraper with her slimy boss Dylan (Patrick Dempsey).

“Dark of the Moon,” like its predecessors the original “Transformers” (2007) and the sequel “Revenge of the Fallen” (2009), is a special-effects extravaganza, especially in the battle of Chicago that makes up the final forty minutes or so (though even those of us who know the city well will have trouble deciphering the topography of the conflict with any precision). But the constant use of CGI gets decidedly tiresome over the long haul (and this one is way too long, once again droning on for more than two-and-a-half hours). That big concluding battle is pretty much a visual mess (as are, oddly, the sequences juxtaposing real footage and staged scenes involving Presidents Kennedy and Obama). And it’s oddly dull as well, even when people are scrambling down the glass sides of skyscrapers that are tumbling to the ground.

That’s partially because the picture isn’t just poorly written, with streams of cliché that one can only hope are intended as send-ups of wretched dialogue, but also badly shot and edited. Amir Mokri’s camerawork relies far too much on rapid-fire movement and brutal close-ups, and the editing shared by Roger Barton, William Goldenberg and Joel Negron accentuates the jaggedness with its dizzying machine-gun style. Those qualities are part of the CGI sequences, too, which as a result are frequently indecipherable. And all the ‘bots remain dull metal-men—even the little ones that are Sam’s pets, and designed to be naughty gremlins, and the purportedly poignant Bumblebee.

With a few exceptions, the humans are no better. John Malkovich has some over-the-top fun as Sam’s supercilious boss, and John Turturro returns to chew up the scenery again as ex-man-in-black Simmon, as also do Kevin Dunn and Julie White as Sam’s sitcomish, intensely irritating parents. But though Huntington-Whiteley looks great running around in her designer dresses and ultra-tight jeans, her acting talent seems inferior even to Fox’s, which may explain some of the hyperkinetic editing in her scenes that seems designed to disguise her inadequacies in that department. Duhamel and Gibson strike the usual poses, and Dempsey is conventionally sleazy, while Frances McDormand is wasted as the purse-lipped director of the National Intelligence Agency, so-called. As for Ken Jeong, who’s stuck with the most deplorable material as an engineer named Wang, the less said the better; he’s an even more offensive stereotype than he was in the “Hangover” movies.

The central problem, though, is LaBeouf. In the first episode he was a likable schlub, but over the course of the series his character has developed into a loud, abrasive whiner, and in “Moon” he’s pretty much insufferable. It’s difficult to embrace an action-adventure movie when its hero is a guy it’s hard to root for.

“Dark of the Moon” is, in the end, a bombastic, elephantine bore whose lack of visceral excitement is topped only by its excess of stupidity. Like the later “Star Wars” episodes, though, it will probably be embraced nonetheless by die-hard fans, as well as by lemming-like sequel-goers who will traipse into theatres even for utter drek like the last two “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. But it should really be consigned to the cinematic scrap heap.

Grade: D

It’s truly frightening. Not the old Gaston Leroux novel about the mysterious figure that haunts the Paris Opera–that’s more camp than classic. Nor any of the myriad versions of it that have been made for the big screen or television–not even the 1925 Lon Chaney epic, which remains great fun but is hardly terrifying. No, what’s really frightening are two names–Andrew Lloyd Webber and Joel Schumacher. Each alone is sufficient to cause an involuntary shudder in anybody with an iota of good taste. But the thought of them combined ups the effect exponentially. It’s the mixture of Lloyd Webber’s slick banality and Schumacher’s wild flamboyance that makes this long-gestating filmization of the inexplicably successful stageshow, which has been playing nonstop on Broadway since 1988 and spawned a small army of touring companies, so frightful in every sense of the word. On the boards “The Phantom of the Opera” was bloated kitsch; now, thanks to Schumacher, it’s hysterically bloated kitsch.

With some rearranging–the famous chandelier crash is moved from the first act close to the big finale, for example–and some not-always well-advised additions, like periodic returns to the later period in which the show begins before flashing back to the central story, the movie is a quite faithful transposition of the stage musical to the screen. Certainly none of the sung-through score appears to have been cut. That’s not much of a blessing, however, since Lloyd Webber’s habit of endlessly repeating his limited number of melodies gets tiresome even if one likes them the first time around (Wagner didn’t apply the leitmotif principle with such dedication) and the lyrics are even more puerile than remembered. Nor is there any significant alteration in the goofily romantic, Beauty-and-the-Beast retread he fashioned from Leroux’s gorier potboiler. The tale of the disfigured genius who lives in the catacombs beneath the Opera and tutors a young member of the chorus whom he intends to make not only the company’s star soprano but his lover as well–only to have his hopes shattered when her childhood friend, the nobleman Raoul, becomes his romantic rival–remains hokum in the purest form, suffused with music that’s a potpourri of elements, from faux opera to patter songs reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan to big Broadway ballads. Still, audiences have responded with rapturous acceptance to what should, if quality were the determining factor, have been a floperetta (to use the Broadway jargon), so the content of this “Phantom” will hardly displease the already addicted. (Whether it will expand the current fan base is entirely another question: newcomers are unlikely to be bowled over by the gooey mixture of schmaltz and throbbing emotionalism).

The more serious question is how well Schumacher’s picture presents the material. It’s certainly a lush production, in which the design (Anthony Pratt, John Fenner, Paul Kirby), sets (Celia Bobak) and costumes (Alexandra Byrne) are all very opulent (though often excessively busy) and the cinematography (John Mathieson) equally plummy. But what’s going on in front of all the elaborate backdrops is less impressive. The three leads sing well enough, but none exhibits any real charisma. Gerard Butler makes a curiously bland Phantom, never mustering the commanding presence that’s needed; and Patrick Wilson can’t give much to the stock figure of Raoul (certainly one of the most inept excuses for a hero ever created) beyond a boyish handsomeness. As for Emmy Rossum as Christine Daae, the female member of the romantic triangle, she evinces a winsome look but a plastic personality–the role might as well be played by a wax statue from Madame Tussaud’s. Meanwhile the usually forceful Miranda Richardson is almost anonymous as Christine’s guardian Mme. Giry. One shouldn’t blame the actors overmuch, though, since they’re hostage to Schumacher’s conception–and he, remember, is the fellow who destroyed the “Batman” franchise with his odd penchant for melding long dull patches with hyper-stylized and hyper-kinetic bursts of splashy razzmatazz. Here we find a similarly peculiar blend. Large portions of “Phantom” (big duets especially) are staged at a somber, almost glacial pace, but elsewhere–especially in the bigger production numbers–Schumacher and editor Terry Rawlings opt for a kind of rapid over-cutting that spotlights some really bizarre inserts. The worst examples are two of the show’s poorest songs, “Masquerade” and “Point of No Return,” both of which are made so jagged by the pointless exhibitionism of the camerawork that they become visually exhausting. (The repeated cutaways to the oddly-costumed dancers in the latter number–who look like refugees from an S&M bar–are particularly clumsy, and rather ugly.)

So are there any pleasures to be found in this “Phantom”? Of course. Minnie Driver manages some easy laughs as the company’s reigning Italian diva, a prima donna in every sense of the term. And Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds have a field day as the Opera’s new owners, providing a desperately needed spark (and a rare sense of fun) to the proceedings in their patter songs. The sound is excellent, too, for which Tony Dawe, Andy Nelson and Anna Behlmer are responsible. That’s not an insignificant element in a project like this.

But on the whole while devotees may be satisfied, it’s probable that most viewers coming to “The Phantom of the Opera” for the first time are going to leave wondering what all the fuss has been about for the last two decades. The picture opens with a scene set in 1919, where the remnants of the company are being sold off at auction; and one of the items on the block is the wreckage of the chandelier that came crashing down in what’s described as “the famous disaster” of forty-nine years earlier. Perhaps down the line in 2053 people will be using the identical words to hearken back to this big, bombastic bore of a movie, which isn’t likely to be of any help in reviving the movie musical–a genre which, despite “Chicago,” is still on life support.