No? Well, then Bay has quite the treat in store for you, my friend. His newest Transformers film, Age of Extinction, is probably the lowest point in the series’ history–the most overproduced, overlong and frustratingly obnoxious of them all. Kind of a reboot–in that it features an entirely new cast (good riddance, Shia LaBeouf!)–while also functioning as a sequel to the last film, it is a painful, endless slog through so many ‘epic’ battles of the city- and citizenry-flattening variety that you’ll soon lose count, unable to tell who is pummeling whom–or why–the glow of that Exit sign off in the distance growing ever more enticing by the second.

It’s been four years since the events of Dark of the Moon, when the benevolent alien robot race the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), had defeated the Decepticons–their not-so-benevolent contemporaries–thereby preventing humanity from becoming enslaved. But so much damage was wrought in the process that the US government has decided to end their alliance with the Autobots, and all Transformers–good and bad alike–are now being hunted down (very reminiscent of the plot of the last X-Men film). Responsible for this is a CIA unit headed by Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), a man secretly working with an intergalactic bounty-hunting Transformer called Lockdown. Lockdown is helping Attinger to not only wipe out the Autobots, but also procure a mysterious substance to be sold to a tech billionaire (Stanley Tucci) that could birth an army of human-controlled Transformers.

Cut to rural Texas, where inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives with teenage daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz). Their uneventful lives receive a major jolt one day when an old truck that Cade brings into his barn turns out to be a wounded Optimus Prime. Our tinkerer fixes him up as best he can, but before Optimus is fully on his feet, Attinger catches wind of the situation and sends out his men to the Yeager home. Cade, Tessa and their friends (TJ Miller and Jack Reynor) hightail it out of there, while Optimus calls upon the surviving Autobots to reunite, all in preparation for a showdown with the CIA, Lockdown, as well as the new human-designed Transformer, Galvatron (Frank Welker) and his army–a war that will see them tumbling through Chicago, Beijing and finally Hong Kong, where all the action comes to a dizzying head.

Age of Extinction, like its predecessors, doesn’t ask much of its human actors except that they be willing to run around aplenty, and look alternately shocked and frightened. Wahlberg–who appeared to have similar instructions when shooting for The Happening a while back–abides by these flimsy standards well enough, as do the others, though it’s frustrating to see talents of Grammer and Tucci’s calibre wasted to this degree. Also frustrating is watching Peltz inherit heroine duties from Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Megan Fox, which basically means she pulls on some Daisy Dukes and requires constant rescuing, just so the big manly men have something to do. Character development–already constrained by the sheer dispensability of human life here, where cars and buildings are crushed with little regard for the casualties racked up in the process–is further curbed by hokey dialogue of the kind even Ian McKellen couldn’t salvage on his best day, comprising gems like, “We don’t have a home, Dad. It blew up.”

There’s no question, of course, that the special effects here are pretty amazing–it’s always a pleasure, for instance, to watch the Transformers transform, thousands of itsy bitsy metal parts moving and clicking into place. Even the demolition is occasionally dazzling, rendered in vibrant, realistic detail. But without a cohesive storyline to rein in all the subplots, these sequences–featuring an interminable, noisy onslaught of explosions and car chases and relentless crunching of concrete and metal and glass–start feeling utterly gratuitous and nonsensical, not to mention very taxing on the senses. There’s so much going on, and for so long without respite that I had to periodically whip off the 3D glasses just to keep from being overwhelmed by it all.

Also off-putting about Age of Extinction is the unapologetic way in which it lays bare its commercial aspirations–it was no coincidence, for instance, that an Asian city was chosen to host the climactic scene of carnage (despite making little narrative sense), a clear nod to the franchise’s substantial business interests in this part of the world. And there are numerous obvious product placements scattered throughout the film, some of which, again, panders to overseas markets. Suffice it to say, the film will make a crapload of money, as will the god-knows-how-many installments are to come in the future, each no doubt dumber than the last. There’s a scene in the film where an old cinema hall owner comments on the present-day movie industry, bemoaning its love of crappy “sequels and remakes”. You laugh, because its so rare to see self-referential humour in a Transformers film, until you realise that Michael Bay is probably sitting atop a pile of money laughing right back at you.