Usually when I catch a widely released movie I try to post a review relatively soon after watching it (time permitting of course) to help you guys decide whether or not to plonk down your hard earned cash on what’s being offered up at the local multiplex. However, with Michael Bay’s fifth (!) entry into the much maligned Transformers franchise, I was a little slow off the mark because even a little under a week after seeing it I still wasn’t entirely sure how to verbalize what the fuck I’d sat through. Since the (admittedly cool) original, Bay’s tenuous grip on the series’ quality has been slipping like a hook-handed baby trying to hoist a piano with a rope and pulley; but with the previous instalment, the ludicrously bloated Age Of Extinction, I’d assumed the franchise had hit a new low despite bringing in an ungodly amount of cheddar cheese from box offices around the world.
However, never let it be said that Bay doesn’t have the ability to keep topping himself and if you thought previous film was a frenzied mess, you’d better dig your heels in, because The Last Knight could very well be one of the most brain-frying duds ever made.
Transformers are still technically outlawed and Texan (read: Boston) inventor Cade Yeager has gone underground to protect all the scattered Autobots left behind in Optimus Prime’s absence.
But where is Prime, you ask? Well, the Autobot leader, last seen making a vow to stick it to his creators and blasting off into the stars to find them, has come a cropper at the hands of Quintessa, a type of robot/squid/woman who has designs to get her warring creations back in line and kill an oncoming threat dubbed Unicron. To do this, she ensnares Prime under her thrall and then has him remain offscreen for about the next two hours… not a great start.
Meanwhile, after Cade, aside from bumping into feisty, robot loving, teen orphan Izabella, has a run in with a mortally wounded Transformer of ancient origin who kicks the scatter shot plot into action by bestowing our constantly breathless hero with a shabe changing seal/thingie that – like everything else in the movie – changes shape on a whim but isn’t terribly well explained.
Before you know it, a multitude of plots suddenly appear and start brawling amongst themselves for dominance, much like the Cybertronian combatants we’ve spent four movies watching: something living inside of Earth has inspired Quintessa to bring the ruined husk of Cybertron here to destroy our homely little mud ball while Megatron tries to deal with the American government in order to nab the macguffin clinging to his person. However, thanks to rambling nobleman Sir Edmund Burton, the Transformers have a secret history on Earth that goes back all the way to the times of King Authur and only historian, Vivian Wembley, a descendant of Merlin himself, can unlock the ancient tech that can save us all.
At their worst, the Transformers movies are usually loud, overlong, obnoxious affairs that generally end up being insulting to all carbon based life forms – but at least there’s always been that Michael Bay, visual razzle dazzle to take your mind of the awfulness of the plots. Not here though, as Transformers: The Last Knight is a truly bewildering suckfest that really should carry a government health warning. A maelstrom of unfunny one liners, flubbed exposition and loud noisy things assault you mercilessly that stands out as one of the worst examples of cinematic storytelling I have ever seen. The fact that a brainstrust of writers and no less than seven (fucking seven!) editors put this shite together is horrifying to say the least, but this is Bay’s fifth time at this, how the hell can he actually be getting worse at this? Like Roland Emmerich with Independence Day: Resurgence and the Wachowskis with Jupiter Ascending, there really is no excuse for someone with this much experience at making this exact type of thing to put out a product this shit.
The attempts at worldbuilding are laugh out loud bad as they inexplicably contradict things we know from the earlier movies – Prime has been consistently flummoxed about revelations concerning Tranformers dicking around with the Pyramids and the moon landing, so the fact that the race was chummy with Merlin and Bumblebee apparently fought in WWII will surely short circuit a diode or two – and the nature that conspiracy obsessed Bay gets all this detail across is even worse. Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins plays a Lord who knows all about all this random Transformers shit, thus the vast majority of his dialogue is mountains and mountains of very important exposition spell spell out what and why everything is happening – so why is everything rendered virtually unintelligible by the choice to make Hopkins to play his role as “comically” senile? Whether going off on unfunny, rambling tangents or screaming a fat person off a submarine (go with it) the only thing more distracting than his performance is that he plays most of it next to his 4 foot, lunatic, robot, ninja, butler. Yep, you read that right. You getting me now?
No one (except maybe Bumblebee and an underused Isabella Merced) escapes Bay’s disinterest in keeping things even remotely logical – it’s like he’s bored and is trying to drum up his own interest by torpedoing his own movie for kicks. Why else would you have a scene where uber-threat Megatron (his transformation into Galvatron in the last movie all but forgotten) has to negotiate with a group of lawyers to get his troops released from jail in an unfunny, Suicide Squad style bit; or have Stanley Tucci cameo as a drunken Merlin in the medieval prologue; or have Laura Haddock’s professor character vacuum packed in a tight shirt and specs like she’s waiting to fuck a plumber in a porn film? I suppose it fits in with the plot thread that Wahlberg’s hero hasn’t had his end away for years despite spending the entire movie dressed like he’s about to debut in a Bon Jovi video – but still… Ok, how about the fact that despite being slathered all over the posters and trailers, Optimus Prime is barely in this movie for TWENTY MINUTES!? This fucker’s 151 minutes long, people!!
Oh, sure, the explosions are big and the CGI is a photo real as ever, but even I’ve got to draw the line somewhere and I’m a fan! The flashy stuff just isn’t enough to distract from anymore, this shit has got to start making sense or the proposed legion of spin-off’s that’s being threatened is done before it even starts.
I’m gonna leave you now with quite possibly the most damning comparison I can muster and while it may seem like I’m marginalising mental illness in order to put the boot in on a lame, sci-fi epic, I can assure you I mean no offence. During the film, as plot points, unfunny gags and various stuff hurled themselves at us with confusing speed, I turned to a friend of mine and tactfully asked if this is what it is like to be off your meds in the maniac phase of bipolar disorder. My friend who has had major experience in this field, agreed, but said the person experiencing it can usually make some sort of sense of the chaotic information overload that’s occurring.
On the flip side, no one is making sense of Transformers: The Last Knight. Make of that what you will.
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