Michael Bay is now acknowledging what 80 percent of America's film critics already told him: The second "Transformers" movie sucked.

"It was kind of a mess, wasn't it?" Bay, who directed the 2009 blockbuster "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," admitted to The Los Angeles Times.

Yes, it was a mess, Mr. Bay. It was an "overblown special-effects train wreck" with offensive characters (remember the jive-talking Autobots?) and lame humor, as The Movie Cricket wrote then. It scored a lowly 20 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes critics' aggregator site.

Bay is making his late mea culpa as part of the marketing for "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," which opens July 1. It's Bay's third movie based on the shape-shifting Hasbro toy line.

“Look," Bay continued to The Los Angeles Times, "the [second] movie had some good things in it and it was entertaining and it did very well, but it also failed in some key ways. I learned from it. And now with this third movie we’re going back to basics and I absolutely believe this is going to be a much better film than the second one.”

What Bay and its studio, Paramount Pictures, don't want to remember is that they were really ticked off at the critics back in 2009 for daring to say that "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," as successful as it was, was a bad movie.

Paramount was so angry that the studio decided not to show critics its next Hasbro-based action blockbuster, "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" before it opened in theaters.

With Bay's admission, no doubt Paramount will be sending its apologies to those critics any day now.