There’s a song in Team America in which the lonesome soloist, belting out a mournful dirge to his departed love, exhales, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark, when he made Pearl Harbour”. If Trey Parker and Matt Stone ever team up for a sequel to that film, perhaps they could pen some new lyrics about Michael Bay and his latest blockbuster, Transformers. However, if they did, perhaps a requiem would seem most appropriate given the dire extent to which Bay ‘misses the mark’ this time around.

From the opening voice-over in which a mechanised character recalls his search for the mystic “cube” that would bring life to his planet, Transformers is awash in a sea of misdirection. For those not familiar with the 1980s cartoon series on which the film is based, Transformers are warring alien robots (“Non-Biological Extraterrestrials” in the film version) divided between the good ‘Autobots’ and the bad ‘Decepticons’. When the ‘cube’ is discovered on our planet, Earth becomes the setting for a battle between the two robot factions’ attempts to retrieve it. And that’s about the extent of the plot but at a running time of over 140 minutes you’d think there’d be more to it.

The screenplay, which desperately needed to engage the audience’s empathy for the robots to have any real affect, similarly misses its mark. Instead, the Transformers’ dialogue oscillates between profitless exposition and clichéd bravado (“Two will fight. One will stand. One will fall”) uttered with the emotional intensity of a tele-prompter. It’s as if the writers’ script brief read, “forget character – just write up cue cards so we can get on with the special effects”. The problem is the special effects, while occasionally impressive, ultimately amount to a one-trick pony. Once you’ve seen the Transformers shape-shift into an 18-Wheeler or F-22 Raptor there’s few other visual surprises, so that by the two-hour mark that trick pony has well and truly been flogged like a dead horse.

But there’s another side to Transformers that drastically weakens its appeal, even as mindless popcorn fare. The extent to which Bay’s film panders to the worst kind of white macho culture – picture a lobotomised version of The Footy Show and you’re almost there – is truly discomforting. The first half hour is riddled with the kind of straight-faced racism that would make KKK smile. When the script’s through belittling Hispanics, infantilising Arabs and stereotyping African Americans it turns a sexist gaze towards busty solarium beauties that are given plenty of screen time but no real sense of agency. Women in Bay’s films have a tendency to be eye-candy, helpless victims or catalysts for ridiculous plot revelations.

Equally irksome, the product placement characteristic of most big studio films has been amped up to shameless levels here. Forget the old yellow Volkswagen beetle, in this outing Autobot Bumblebee has been refitted as a new model Camaro. Oh, in case you don’t get the reference the first time, there’s plenty of close-up shots panning across the car’s badge, while character’s intone, “Nice Camaro”, “Is that a Camaro”, “Someone stole my Camaro”, “My Camaro just transformed”. It’s no wonder the running time is so long when everything from mobile phones to soft drinks and websites gets their 15 seconds of promotional fame. You can forget about this film being a financial flop, with all the endorsement cheques rolling in Transformers will have made its money back long before a single piece of merchandising makes its way through toy shop cash registers.

The only real light in this otherwise forgettable experience is the performance of Shia LeBeouf (Disturbia), who injects some much needed life into the role of Sam, the nerdy teenager who inadvertently ‘adopts’ one of the Transformers and ends up aiding the Autobots in their quest to save humanity. Still, as I left the screening of Transformers I couldn’t help but recall another line of that song from Team America: “why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?” My thoughts exactly.