In a battered exercise book, that lurks in a dusty cardboard box at the back of Michael Bay’s mind, there’s a list of the things that 14-year old Bay thinks are cool. Namely: Hot chicks draped over shiny vehicles. Explosions. Robots with giant, swinging, testicles. Robots with wind. Casual racism. A hot girl that wants to sleep with me – but she’s actually a hot robot! Fantastically, someone has given adult Bay enough money to make his adolescent dreams come true. Twice.

On a sense of pure scale, the Transformers movies are impressive. On almost every other cinematic yardstick, they are made from the purest fail. Characters (robots and humans alike) appear for a few scenes, then disappear forever. Action scenes are a mash of whiplash twisted metal and poorly composited CGI. The actors are clearly confused.

It seems a shame that while writers Orchi and Kurtzmen bent over backwards to make sure the Trek reboot fit in with established cannon, they treat Transformers lore with a derisive sneer, covering a bare-bones plot with endless lasagne layers of pointless business, and turning noble leader Optimus Prime into a brawling psychopath. Even the potentially show-stopping addition of the gestalt Constucticon monster Devestator is wasted, partly thanks to a design that makes him look like a candy coloured hunchback, and partly thanks to some rubbish cross cutting that shows his composite parts causing mayhem while they’re still supposedly joined together. It’s just sloppy film-making. Sadly, we suspect the 14 year-old Bay could care less.