Legend has it that Michael Caine, when asked why an accomplished actor would stain his resume with the spectacularly awful Jaws: The Revenge (1987), replied, “I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” Years from now I hope Mark Wahlberg can come up with an equally stylish explanation for his decision to participate in Transformers: Age of Extinction. Artistic range is one thing, but stuff like this and The Departed sharing space on the same CV will give conniptions to future cinema historians.

Given the level of bombast employed by Michael Bay in Age of Extinction, it’s tempting to fight fire with fire in a review. I read one critic over the weekend who compared watching this movie to being trapped in a canvas bag and being beaten with pipes. See? That’s just hyperbole. For my part, I spent the 165-minute running time in a comfortable seat with my feet up. I even had Raisinets. It was very hot outside the theater, but air-conditioned inside. There were no bags, no pipes. In fact, I’ll state for the record that watching Transformers: Age of Extinction is much more enjoyable than being physically beaten. The marketing folks are free to put that on the DVD box.

For those following this four-part (and counting) film series, Age of Extinction takes place four years after the events of Transformers: Dark of the Moon, in which the noble Autobots fought back the evil Decepticons but laid waste to Chicago in the process. The wary truce between humans and the alien-robot Autobot race – led by Optimus Prime, a ’bot whose stentorian tones could make ordering off a menu sound like reading the Declaration of Independence – is now over, and the few surviving good-guy Transformers have gone underground.

Ever the master tactician, Optimus – who possesses the ability to change into the form of a tractor-trailer cab – figures hiding in a dilapidated Texas movie theater will throw off his enemies. (It’s certainly the last place I’d look for a truck.) He’s finally discovered by potential friend Cade Yeager (Wahlberg), a starry-eyed robotics expert who works in his barn when he isn’t counseling his long-legged 17-year-old daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) to stay away from boys. A generation ago, in Fear (1991), Wahlberg played a young tough who seduced and threatened girls like Tessa. Now he’s playing the dad. Times change.

Anyway, Cade Yeager (Optimus calls him that, so I will too) saves Optimus but incurs the wrath of a CIA black-ops team led by a trenchcoated tough guy (Titus Welliver) who, when asked for a search warrant, actually says “My face is my warrant.” That is not, I believe, supported by the fourth amendment to the Constitution, but neither this CIA team nor its master, Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) cares much about legal niceties. They want to destroy the remaining Autobots because alien robots have no business on Earth. Attinger feels so strongly on this point that he’s willing to partner up with a completely different species of alien robot to help cleanse the planet of the Autobots. That’s government logic for you, I guess.

What follows is a very, very long chase sequence, and non-stop scenes of robots transforming from vehicles into warriors that will make a very nice demo reel for some Hollywood CGI expert. I don’t recall exactly how the action eventually moved from Texas to Hong Kong, but it does, and eventually Stanley Tucci arrives to play a billionaire tech tycoon – kind of a cross between Steve Jobs and a weasel. Initially he’s a villain, but by the end of the film he’s making the movie’s only real wisecracks and posing dramatically alongside Cade Yeager in that inimitable Michael Bay style. Bay likes to shoot from low angles, making heroes look even more proud and bad guys look even more awesomely evil. Bay doesn’t make good movies in the conventional sense – last year’s Pain and Gain was a frenzied, delightful anomaly – but he can frame the heck out of a shot.

Earlier this summer, Gareth Edwards created a Godzilla remake that took the unusual tack of teasing us with hardly any scenes of the title monster. That approach is not for Bay, who would probably sell an Autobot-of-the-Month calendar at the concession stand if he could. There’s no such thing as overexposure in BayWorld, and restraint is a dirty word. When Tessa opens a mailbox early in the film, I’m surprised there weren’t stuntmen and computer-generated warships inside. Most CGI-oriented films tend to use the technology to punctuate their story, but Bay’s CGI is the story: His punctuation mark of choice is the exclamation point, and it appears at the end of every sentence. Unfortunately, this approach inevitably makes Big Moments feel small, as when Optimus rides a giant prehistoric Dinobot into battle late in the film. You really shouldn’t watch a scene like that and think, Sure, whatever.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is visually rich – how could it not be? – but emotionally bankrupt, narratively obtuse and absolutely, 100 percent inhuman. It’s objectively bad by almost every filmmaking standard, and yet there’s something there that commands attention. For better or worse, Bay is Hollywood’s Optimus Prime, commanding a fire-breathing CGI army into the melee of modern movie epics. Still, it’s better than being beaten with pipes. See? If you can’t say anything nice….

(IMAGE: A scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.)