15 Highest Grossing Movies Of The Decade: Ranked Worst To Best

14. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

Worldwide Box Office: $1.123 billion

All-Time Ranking: #12

2010s Ranking: #10

It would be easy to say that Michael Bay learnt some lessons from the out-and-out atrocity that was Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen; its follow-up is, if we're working on a binary scale, a better film. It's not as racist, not as thrown together, not as blood-boilingly terrible. But make no mistake: it is still awful. And while Revenge could at least call on the writer's strike as a defence (not that it's an excuse for something that bad), there's nothing but a blatant disregard for the audience at play here.

Like many of the films on the lower rungs of this list, it feels all too obviously like a marketing exercise, with a set-up that makes for an enticing teaser trailer (the moon landing was a front for exploration of a Transformer ship), a new legacy character to convince twice burnt fans to return (Sentinel Prime, in a double-tap voiced by Leonard Nimoy), enough high-end thesps to give the illusion of quality (in this case John Malkovich and Frances McDormand), a female lead who could be a Victoria's Secret model (in fact, this one was) and enough faux-inventive action sequences to harp on about in interviews. When you get to the stuff that comes after buying the ticket, however, it's a mess of contradictions and poor filmmaking.

Yet it works - Dark Of The Moon is the most successful Transformers movie. Life just isn't fair some times.