"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" reviews probably better than movie

(CBS) Because for weeks you've suffered through interviews featuring smug Shia LaBeouf yapping about how he, like, is all totally bad, we have a treat for you: critics writing about the wonderful horribleness of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon."

It seems as if the film's director, Michael Bay, has gone to new extremes of action directing and lots of critics have gone to new critical extremes, simultaneously praising the movie as artful and as crap. Ah, to have cake and eat it, too! This movie is critic-proof, anyway.

Here are some of the most brilliant moments from the reviews out there.

Andrew O'Hehir in Slate: "In food terms, 'Dark of the Moon' is like going to TGI Friday's and ordering everything on the menu and then going to Krispy Kreme and doing it again. It's not worth doing, it'll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad, but as a performance-art act of juvenile Id-fulfillment, it's magnificent."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "Shia LaBeouf is scarcely heroic, and his girlfriend has no particular function except to be in constant peril and (in two hilarious shots) stare thoughtfully into space as if realizing something."

Scott Tobias at NPR: "[L]ike the last entry, 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,' 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon' demonstrates the problem with sequels to wildly successful bad movies: The filmmakers are eager to bottle the same anti-magic that pummeled audiences the first (and second) time around. That means more leering shots of hot cars and hot women, the absurd gravitas of a military propaganda film, the 'comic relief' robots with foreign accents, and an editing style that's either legitimately avant-garde or timed to the wing-flaps of a deranged hummingbird."

Dan Kois in SF Weekly: "The prologue's moon-landing sequence (in glorious 3-D) is an exceptional reminder that for all [Michael] Bay's blowhard douchebagginess, he's a masterful maker of images.

The loving 3-D shot of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's unearthly ass that immediately follows is an exceptional reminder that he's still a blowhard douchebag, and that the rest of the movie is unlikely to meet the level of its first scene."

A.O. Scott in the New York Times: "I can't decide if this movie is so spectacularly, breathtakingly dumb as to induce stupidity in anyone who watches, or so brutally brilliant that it disarms all reason. What's the difference?"

Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News: "While the first film found some humanity in the connection between [lead character] Sam and the robots - especially his car, Bumblebee - this one brushes emotion aside like Optimus Prime dismissing rush-hour traffic. All that matters is the long, slow slog to the Chicago-set, theater-rattling finale, which seems to last about four hours."

What about you, moviegoer? What do you think of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"? Let us know in the comments.