If Transformers: Dark of the Moon is indeed Michael Bay’s final entry in the Hasbro toy-inspired franchise, as he has repeatedly intimated, then it is a fitting swan song for a director whose lust - and gift - for spectacle remains unmatched. Exhilarating and exasperating, awe-inspiring and stupefying, the third installment in the blockbuster alien-robot saga is less a movie than a prolonged manic episode. In other words, it’s a Michael Bay film.

Any suspicion that Bay might have matured at all since his last film, 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, vanishes immediately after Dark of the Moon’s opening credits, when model-actress (in that order) Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, replacing tempestuous Megan Fox as the franchise’s resident eye candy, is introduced ass-first. The camera lingers on her backside, mesmerized, as she makes her way up the stairs to summon our hero, Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), from the bed she inexplicably shares with him. For a director so notoriously ADD-afflicted as Bay, he can show remarkable focus when circumstances require it.