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Let's start this review with a rhetorical question: Just who are the Transformers movies for? It's a question I ask about this series with every film, ever since Transformers was released in 2007, and this latest one inspires it even more fiercely. Rated PG-13, Transformers: Age of Extinction features giant robots who turn into cars -- the mainstay of this franchise ever since its cartoon roots in the '80s -- but it also shows us a (human) supporting character being killed by an  incendiary bomb and then lingering on his charcoal-black corpse and death-contorted face, and uses the word "bitch" like it was punctuation.

  What I guess I'm asking is this: Are these films for extraordinarily violent children, or just for extraordinarily childlike adults?  

The plot involves a government conspiracy to not only round up and destroy all the Transformers robots stuck on Earth after the first three films, but also to appropriate their technology, an axis of evil with bearded and brusque CIA man Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) on one end and bald, bespectacled tech mogul Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) on the other. Autobot leader and windbag 18-wheeler Optimus Prime is missing in action since Transformers 3, but Texan inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), scavenging an abandoned theater, finds a bullet-pocked 18-wheeler and soon realizes that guys, he found a Transformer; this brings the CIA and the robot bounty hunter Lockdown (Mark Ryan) to his door demanding he hand over Prime, which puts Cade, his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) and her boyfriend, Irish race driver Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor) on the run alongside Optimus as the remaining Autobots try and prevent disaster.

It would be one thing if Transformers 4 were just a Michael Bay movie -- he's a specialist in glossy nonsense meant as low entertainment, so we shouldn't expect much different -- but even by the standards of his career, this is a new low. Bloated to 165 minutes and incredibly lazy, Bay can't even bother to make his transitions between scenes make any kind of sense, geographically or in terms of time. (At one point, our heroes are in daylight, bad guys then roll down the road at dusk ... and then arrive at our heroes' location in full daylight.)

I could discuss how idiotic Ehren Kruger's script is at much greater length -- at one point, trying to get an alien megaweapon out of Hong Kong before it explodes, Optimus asks Wahlberg's crew to drive it out the city, despite having three robots who can fly on his team -- but then again, unlike Bay, I know that greater length doesn't actually mean greater quality. In fact, that's the ugly truth behind all the Transformers films: To be overwhelmed is not the same thing as to be overjoyed.

It would be one thing if Transformers 4 were just dumb and bad. But it's so loaded with product placement -- for beer, for soda, for lingerie, for other Hasbro properties -- that the reek of cynicism wafting off it makes you recoil. The effects are shockingly bad -- blurry, too-crisp against the live background, weightless and airless -- and the 3D is really only there for what I call prophylactic purposes, to keep the plasticky, fast-moving CGI world inside the film from looking awful, not to make anything in particular look good. And this film -- with its finale set in Hong Kong -- is also backed in part by a Chinese state-owned company, the China Movie Channel, so when Optimus Prime and Wahlberg talk, heart-to-spark, about the film's fake Transformers having souls and rights, it's worth noting they're doing so in a movie partially funded by a totalitarian government that doesn't think that real-world humans do. Fueled by nostalgia, corporate profiteering and a beer-commercial aesthetic mixed with hypocritical "values," Transformers: Age of Extinction isn't a bad movie; it's the worst possible product of a big Hollywood system drunk on a cocktail of fermented nostalgia and rancid profiteering while driving moviegoing into the ground.