TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT
Autobots meet Camelot
released OuT NOW! 12a | 149 minutes Director Michael Bay Cast Mark Wahlberg, laura Haddock, Josh duhamel, anthony Hopkins, santiago Cabrera
Robots in Disguise rubbing shoulders with Knights of the Round Table is incongruous, yet the clash of mythologies is one of the least contradictory things about the fifth entry in Michael Bay’s high-decibel franchise.
While The Last Knight is unmistakably a Transformers movie (you know the drill: the near-relentless assault on the eyes and ears; the trademark Bay slow-mo), it takes a valiant stab at doing something new.
After an unnecessarily bloated, more-of-the-same first hour, The Last Knight kicks into another gear when Anthony Hopkins’s Sir Edmund Burton unites Mark Wahlberg’s Cade and Laura Haddock’s Oxford professor Vivian on a quest for an Arthurian McGuffin. It’s frequently funny and the humans are more than just a side dish to the robot main course. Snarky android butler Cogman is a textbook example of CG comic relief done well, while Hopkins proves to be that rarest of things: a big-name actor saddled with a Basil Exposition role who’s actually enjoying himself.
However, the storytelling gets lost beneath Bay’s hyperkinetic visual style, the mythology is baffling (Optimus Prime’s turn to the dark side never quite rings true), and there are too many characters – franchise veterans Megatron and John Turturro’s Agent Simmons bring so little to the party you feel they were crowbarred in for old-time’s sake.
The Last Knight gamely sets up future instalments – laying ground for the rumoured Bumblebee film – but it’s unlikely to pull in any newcomers yet to be bitten by the Cybertronian bug.
Original star Shia LaBeouf can be glimpsed among the framed photos of scientists and inventors in Burton’s library.