LaBeouf says second ‘Transformers’ lost the heart, third will be best in the franchise

LaBeouf promises better ‘Transformers’ next time

CANNES, France — Shia LaBeouf says the second “Transformers” movie got too big for its own good — but the third one brings the heart back to the franchise.

LaBeouf, who starts work on the next “Transformers” sequel Tuesday, said the third installment will be the best one yet. The new script restores a human element that got lost in the second movie, LaBeouf said.

“When I saw the second movie, I wasn’t impressed with what we did,” LaBeouf said in an interview Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, where his finance drama “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is premiering. “There were some really wild stunts in it, but the heart was gone.”

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” was a runaway commercial success but was drubbed by critics.

Michael Bay returns for the third time as director of the science-fiction franchise, which centers on dueling races of giant robots that bring their war to Earth. The next movie will have what the last one lacked — a sense of human consequences, LaBeouf said.

On the second movie, “we got lost. We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger,” LaBeouf said. “Mike went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie. … You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”

With “Transformers 3,” the toll of the robot war will be grave for our planet, LaBeouf said.

“There’s going to be a lot of death, human death. This time, they’re targeting humans,” LaBeouf said. “It’s going to be the craziest action movie ever made, or we failed.”