Transformersis the best Big Dumb Film of the season claims Donald Clarke

Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Rachael Taylor, Tyrese Gibson, Jon Voight, Anthony Anderson12A cert, gen release, 144 min

MICHAEL Bay's Transformers. Yikes. What three words could more effectively chill the blood of the thinking film-goer? Sydney Pollack's Pokémon, perhaps? Roberto Begnini's Balamory? Transformers were a cadre of robots from the 1980s which - when bashed against the radiator and yanked firmly - would metamorphose into various trucks, handguns and helicopters. The toy version and their animated counterparts on children's television may have been icons of their era, but they hardly scream for reinvention. Mr Bay is the director of Pearl Harborand Armageddon. Just back the manure receptacle up to the cinema, sir. There should be plenty for you here. Well, against all the odds, Transformersturns out to be the best Big Dumb Film of the season.

Shia LaBeouf, a young actor of distracting charm and assurance, plays Sam Witwicky, a nervous, gawky kid who, gifted a few bucks by his dad, buys a wrecked old car and sets about trying to charm the girl in his class who most looks like a manicured gazelle (Megan Fox). It transpires that the car is, in fact, the least threatening incarnation of one member of a gang of friendly cyborgs named the Autobots. After several genuinely amusing scenes in which Sam tries to conceal Autobots - sometimes trucks, sometimes themselves - in his parents' front garden, he becomes drawn into their intergalactic conflict with the more fearsome Decepticons. Meanwhile, in Qatar, American soldiers, confronted by robotic scorpions and such, do their duty in the now-obligatory allegory for the war in Iraq.

Eventually, the film degenerates into a hugely confusing and repetitive mass of squabbling pixels. Briefly glimpsed street signs clarify that the final conflagration is taking place in downtown Los Angeles, but, composed as it is of overly busy computer-generated images, the battle rapidly loses any coherence and the picture flails - rather than races - to its close.

Still, this remains a considerably more entertaining film than we had any right to expect. Roll on Joel Schumacher's Masters of the Universe.