It’s ok, I’m man enough to admit it, I was a vocal supporter of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies and I’m not ashamed to say so. Even now, I’ll still happily go to bat for the first film which updated and streamlined the original concept for transforming robots continuing their explosion-filled civil war in our neck of the woods and turned in a fushion of Bay’s inimitable, sexy/smash mouth style and Spielbergian wonder. The sequels, both Revenge Of The Fallen and Dark Of The Moon, admittedly have more issues than Readers Digest, yet i would argue that behind the unfeasibly crass jokes and crayon-scrawled plotting, both contain enough brain melting imagery to still make your jaw dangle like Devestator’s infamous scrotum.
Am I deluded? Almost certainly, but you have to understand that for this franchise to lose me, Bay would have to fuck it up so spectacularly that even my thirst for ILM carnage and all those awesomely funky sound effects that these films dole out like candy could save the finished product from my newly acquired disdain.
Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourself for an Age Of Extinction.
Five years after the heroic Autobots saved Chicago from a Deception invasion by practically leveling it, all Transformers are now public enemy number one and any surving mechanoids who havn’t already gone into hiding has been slaughtered by a rogue Black Ops Division led by the stern Harold Attinger.
But what of Optimus Prime? Well, the speech spouting Autobot leader has found himself laid pretty low as he’s now a powered down, rusty husk who is stuck in his truck form and about to be sold as scrap. However, as luck would have it, Optimus is purchased by struggling inventor and single father, Cade Yeager, who accidently nurses the battered warrior back to health.
Before you know it, Yeager, his teenage daughter, Tessa and her surprise, really driver boyfriend, Shane are all caught up in a suprisingly complex series of conspiracies that all tie back to the frighteningly robophobic Attinger who is not only in bed (figuratively speaking) with egotistical CEO Joshua Joyce, who is trying to revolutionize the tech industry by utilizing the corpses of hunted Transformers to make military drones, but he’s also doing some shady deals with a Transformer bounty hunter known as Lockdown who wishes to take Prime back to his creators by force.
The focal point of all this clanking, whirring skullduggery is to obtain the element known as (wait for it) Tranformium, which could change our technology overnight, but soon all these point threads will crash together with predictably loud consequences that will see all parties descend upon China and even throw in a reborn Megatron (rebranded as Galvatron) and giant, fire-breathing robot Dinobots to boot.
Believe me, shit’s about to get messy.
If I’m going to have to give the devil his due, Transformers: Age Of Extinction does actually still have a few things left to recommend to viewers blissfully immune to awful script writing and stratospherically overlong running times. For a start, Bay’s ridiculously slick shooting style is present and correct and Mark Wahlberg’s suspiciously Boston-sounding Texan is definately a step-up from the screaming, toxic, rage-o-holic Shia Labeouf’s Sam Witwicky turned into. Also, Bay’s once again lured a solid supporting cast in that allows the likes of Stanley Tucci to ad lib wildly and Kelsey Grammar to slap on his best villain sneer – although, I’d always though Grammer would more at home voicing a Transformer rather than trying to kill them.
However, this is where all the warm, fuzzy feelings come to a screeching halt and the director inevitably gives in to his more exaggerated vices I had hoped a short time away from the franchise to make Pain And Gain would have brought. You see, this time round, some of the tradtional “Bay-isms” we’ve come to expect are now so exaggerated, it verges on self parody and they are almost too numerous to list in a more traditional fashion. On top of this, if Tranformers 4 can’t be bothered to provide me with a proper film, I don’t see why I have to provide it with a proper review and instead I think I’m just going to have a bit of a rant concerning Age Of Extinction’s greatest (s)hits – spoilers warning in effect… as if you actually give a shit.
So, to start, we find out that humans of genius level intellect have started calling the element that Transformers are made of Transformium, which is sort of like referring to water as wet-onium and this is only the tip of an iceberg that lasts nearly 3 hours long and yet doesn’t seem to be about anything.
The dinobots are offhandedly passed off as “ancient knight” transformers and left as that. In fact, never has so much plot amounted to so little, and make no mistake, this movie has a lot of plot. How much, you ask? Well let’s put it this way, the movie has not one, but two arch villains in the form of the gun-faced Lockdown and the newly minted Galvatron, but they have completely different plans that somehow don’t intersect once and they never actually meet. Both plans involve a metric ton of running, screaming and exploding that not only devastates Chicago for a second time after Dark Of The Moon, but also relocates to China for the overlong finale just to take advantage of that juicy, Chinese box office. The chaos is all encompassing to the point that when the film ended, I couldn’t actually remember if one of the Autobot characters (John Goodman’s husky Hound) had actually died or not – something that’s even more worrying when you realise that the movie omits details like this to take time to creepily point out in great detail an actual legal loophole that allows Yeager’s underage daughter to bang her noticably older boyfriend. Priorites, I guess…
At this point, I’ll pause to once again remind you that Transformers are made of an element fucking called Transformium.
Anyway, possibly the only thing more deranged than the ear shattering action is the truly deranged amount of product placement Bay indulges in. Such truly insane examples involves an exploding bus in China that has an ad for Victoria’s Secret that is on the written on the back. No actual advertisement, just Victoria’s Secret just literally printed on the back. In English. If you think that’s painfully unsubtle then get a load of this; after a long foot chase Stanley Tucci’s character actually sits down and drinks a particular Chinese brand of milk. I shit you not, he just sits there and drinks this thing and you fucking watch him do it for like 5 seconds. The film, like, stops and for a frenzied movie like this, five awkward seconds feels like a damn eternity.
Those thinking that the long awaited arrival of the fan-favorite Dinobots might save the day at the last minute may be bitterly disappointed as they are mute, over-designed versions of their original selves who actually cause more damage than the villians and who are allowed to saunter off in their dinosaur forms while no one bats an eyelid. I could go on… but I genuinely think it could be dangerous for my blood pressure to do so.
Less an action/sci-fi movie and more like an uninterrupted train of thought of someone obsessed with property damage, Age Of Extinction somehow expects you to make head and tale of a complex plot that refuses to make any logic, but still thinks you’re dumb enough to Wahlberg-splain how a magnet works.
Oh yeah, and just in case I didn’t make my point clear before; Transformers are made of a material called fucking transformium.
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