Director: Michael Bay
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 149 minutes
Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise is going to be looked back on by film scholars as one of the most peculiar artifacts of our current blockbuster era. The first film, while critically divisive, is still looked back upon positively by most audiences. The same cannot be said about Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon, which are regarded as something between messy and boring, two qualities that do not befit Michael Bay’s filmography.
Age of Extinction then did something novel by scaling the conflict down from world-ending proportions to your average evil-corporation-based tech thriller. Between the adherence to calling the MacGuffin “Transformium” and the gleeful introduction of the Dinobots in the last act, the fourth Transformers film was finally fun again. On top of that, for the first time since the first film, the action sequences felt clean and crisp, allowing for easy discernment of which magical machines were punching which other magical machines. It took its premise seriously but refused to take itself seriously – a careful balancing act that, in the eyes of this critic, worked spectacularly.
This all leads to the most recent installment, Transformers: The Last Knight, which unfortunately does not follow its predecessor in skirting the end-of-the-world stakes, thus making it a bloated and too-often self-serious disappointment. This is a shame because the trailers promised us a film that integrated the Transformers mythos into Arthurian legend.
With such a ridiculous premise, you would hope that the film goes for a National Treasure vibe of self-deprecating humour and intense moments of awe and wonderment. Unfortunately, the film goes down the less successful route of The Da Vinci Code which results in a misguided mish mash of tones that is only occasionally successful in inspiring moments of true childhood glee.
The plot of the film finds Cade Yeager (Mark Whalberg) continuing the resistance effort to protect the transformers after the events of AOE. While saving some adventurous children from the decrepit remnants of the battle of Chicago, from Dark of the Moon, Yeager is given a metallic talisman by a dying transformer. This talisman sends him on a journey to the UK where he meets the leader of an order of protectors tracing their lineage back to Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
This leader is played by a surprisingly spry Anthony Hopkins, who seems to be is enjoying every minute of this ludicrous premise. These scenes set up Yeager’s quest to find the ship to get the staff so they can stop the big bad alien monster who’s poisoned Optimus Prime’s mind back on Cybertron and is returning to Earth to destroy it. Now breathe.
What saves this movie from being in the pits of the franchise is the cast. Whalberg is still good, but Hopkins and Laura Haddock (as Whalberg’s romantic interest) are the real standouts. Haddock is possibly the most well developed female character in all of Bay’s filmography, not that that’s saying very much. When Whalberg wields a legendary sword or Haddock saves the day or Hopkins is giving passersby the bird, the film feels as fun and breezy as Age of Extinction did. Unfortunately, too much time is given to things that are too dark for a film this silly.
It is better than Revenge of the Fallen and Dark of the Moon but far less fun than Transformers and Age of Extinction. I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it, but I think I had enough fun that fans of AOE should give it a shot.
