By Paul Hall
Summer movie season has always included big, loud and sometimes great action franchises. The Transformers are taking part in their fifth summer movie season with the new film Transformers: The Last Knight. But is this a good entry into the season, or just another bombastic attempt to capture some of the summer goldmine?
The general plot of this installment has Optimus Prime far from Earth. Humans are at war with Transformers and there is devastation everywhere. Few humans left on Earth trust any of the Transformers, but Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is one who does. He and Bumblebee work with an English lord (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and an Oxford professor and skeptic (Laura Haddock) to uncover a secret buried deep within Earth in an attempt to stop the chaos.
While this is going on, Optimus is still far away, being brainwashed to come to Earth and destroy the human race so his race can live on. But we’ll see him more toward the end of the film.
Meanwhile, back on our planet, there is more fighting going on, between Transformers and everyone. Plus, there are humans still protecting Transformers. Yep — at this point, this review is as pointless as the plot.
I’m going to threaten my critic card here, but I’ll say that when the Transformers first raced to the screen in 2007, I was excited. It felt visionary and fun. The two-hour-plus run time was full of action and excitement as well as wit and snap. Fast-forward 10 years to this installment and everything is tired and worn. Director Michael Bay fires bullets that pack no impact. And those action sequences are simply muddled and confusing. Only the diehard fans will be able to see through things to know who is fighting whom or what.
Solid actors are forced into roles that don’t let their talents shine. And the story, well, the story does not follow any cohesive thread. I felt like nothing made sense at any point in the film. Maybe that’s not totally bad, but we should expect more from our big-budget action films. As moviegoers, we have gotten smarter and more in tune to following a narrative, even in mega-franchises. We will accept sub-par on the script if we’re paid off handsomely in other ways. It is OK to call a movie a popcorn film, but Transformers: The Last Knight is closer to a bucket of half-popped popcorn seeds made in an air popper with no butter or salt.
Maybe I’m just bitter because I was a fan at the beginning of the series. But this latest installment continues to lose the way to transforming me back into a fan. The messy and bloated effort that I witnessed on the big screen felt like a giant splat ball was thrown against it. And by the way, the amount of coarse language used in this film with what once was a fun set of kids toys is over the top and so out of place it is quite amazing — but I digress.
I guess the hardcore fans may want to check this out, if they are still around — I’m not trying to change their opinion. But for the rest of us, well, there are a lot of better ways to spend two and a half hours of your day. I’ll just keep waiting for this to transform into a fun film franchise again, but I have a feeling I will be waiting for a long time.
Paul’s Grade: C- / D+ (And that is generous)
Transformers: The Last Knight
Rated PG-13
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel
Director: Michael Bay
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