If the romantic comedy isn’t dead, it’s doing a very convincing job of playing possum. Setting aside “serious” variations on the genre (like the Oscar bait Silver Linings Playbook) and Woody Allen movies, there hasn’t been a decent mainstream romcom since 2009’s The Proposal – and, gentle readers, 2009 was a long time ago.

With that in mind, think of David Wain’s They Came Together (R, now available on VOD) as a kind of romcom autopsy: With surgical precision, the writer-director dissects the entire genre in much the same brutally funny fashion with which he cut open the carcass of teen sex comedies with his summer-camp parody Wet Hot American Summer (2001). There’s an almost clinical detachment in Wain’s ability to study a clichéd plot device – say, the “meet cute” moment between two crazy kids who are just destined to wind up together – and hold it up under a bright light for some merciless mockery.

Together is the story of Joel and Molly (Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler), two unhappily single people living lonely lives in New York City, a locale that’s virtually a character in the film. (Does that line sound like a cliché unto itself? The characters in the film think so.) Over dinner with another couple, they narrate the story of how they met (cute, of course); how they didn’t get along until a common passion helped them see the light (“You love fiction books? Me too!”); how work and other relationships challenged their happiness; and, finally, how love conquered all.

Wain’s style of humor isn’t for everyone – just ask my wife, who stormed out of the room after 25 minutes, vowing she’d seen the year’s second-worst film – and some of his jokes are deliberately wearying to even those who share his comic tastes. But that’s his point: Like a cinematic intervention, the filmmaker is using those moments to show us the dreck we’ve been swallowing for years. The characters in They Came Together are the butt of his jokes, but he trusts his audience to be in on the gag.

It’s that same penchant for self-mockery that helps 22 Jump Street (R, now in theaters) rise above the low bar set by that other long-suffering subgenre: The comedy sequel. Most Part 2s are bad enough, but resurrecting a comic premise for the simple reason that the first one made money is cold comfort when the results are so frequently forced, humorless endurance tests. Writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie) understand this, and take every opportunity to have their characters remind us of just how preposterous comic sequels can be. By turning the witty script back onto itself – a rare case of filmic jiu-jitsu – 22 Jump Street will make you believe a sequel can fly.

At the end of 21 Jump Street – an updating of the popular 1980s undercover-cop TV show – not-quite-young-looking Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum) have successfully cracked a high school drug ring, and their hard-talking captain (Ice Cube) tells them they’re going to college. 22 keeps that promise, without letting the characters (or the audience) forget how ridiculous it is for these thirtysomethings to be playing teenagers. Along the way Jenko connects with a fraternity, Schmidt with a coed (Amber Stevens), and not much crime-stopping occurs until – wait for it – Spring Break, of course. By the time these implausibly charming cops arrive in Fort Lauderdale for the festivities and the gunplay, Lord and Miller have accomplished the impossible: They’ve made me look forward to 23 Jump Street.

(IMAGES: Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler in They Came Together, courtesy of Lionsgate Films; Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in 22 Jump Street, courtesy of Sony Pictures.)

In the wake of Tammy’s arrival in theaters, a number of reasonable entertainment columnists have offered think pieces packed with concern about the career path of Melissa McCarthy, the comic actress who has parlayed a breakout role in Bridesmaids (2011) with a number of hit-and-miss comedies playing variations on the same character. One piece even went so far as to wonder out loud how McCarthy can find a way to achieve the same career as Adam Sandler. I think that writer missed the real problem: With Tammy, McCarthy has become Adam Sandler. The better question, then, is: Can she avoid that fate?

In Tammy McCarthy plays a boorish slob who has a very bad day: Her aging Toyota is totaled after a run-in with a deer; she’s fired from her fast-food job, which might seem unfair until we see her reaction to the news; and then she comes home to find her husband (Nat Faxon) cheating on her with a neighbor (Toni Collette). At this last part I began to wonder what’s up, because the film wants us to think ADULTERY! when the tableau witnessed by Tammy is … two people eating a meal at the dining room table. Neither the script nor the action indicates anything more than that has progressed, and yet suddenly Tammy is upstairs packing her bags. Absurdist humor can be fun, but shouldn’t the audience allowed to be in on the joke?

Tammy goes to the home of her mom (Allison Janney) and bypasses maternal comfort in favor of grabbing the bankroll and the car keys belonging to her grandma (Susan Sarandon); then she and her mother’s mother decide to take a trip for no particular reason. (Everything in this film happens for no particular reason.) The road-movie hijinks that ensue – a ruined jet-ski, sex with strangers, Grandma getting drunk, an awkward robbery – probably all seemed funnier on paper than they turn out to be in execution.

No matter how you feel about Tammy, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that McCarthy owns at least some of the responsibility for that reaction. She produced the film and co-wrote it with her husband, the little-known actor Ben Falcone; then Falcone, who’s never directed a movie before, somehow wound up with that job as well. (It pays to know people, I guess.) His inexperience shows, as the film bears the running time of a sprightly comedy and yet feels like the longest 97 minutes of the summer. There’s no internal logic to the length of individual scenes; at times I wondered if the director got distracted by a killer Words With Friends game and forgot to tell the camera operators to stop rolling.

Watching the film, all that creative sloppiness – the wasted opportunities, the squandered talent, the handpicked director – reminded me of an Adam Sandler movie. Sandler, like McCarthy, has a nimble mind and organic comic timing, but you wouldn’t know it from his films. And for years Sandler has held tight control over his lowest-common-denominator movie empire – possibly out of the fear that if he allowed his fate to be put in someone else’s hands, he might be forced to work harder to achieve greater things with his talents. It’s still too early to see if McCarthy is determined to follow that same path, or if Tammy (along with last year’s wan Identity Thief) is just an aberration. Fingers crossed.

(IMAGE: Melissa McCarthy and Susan Sarandon in Tammy; photo courtesy of Warner Bros.)

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.)