TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (M)
Director: Michael Bay ( Armageddon) Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Isabela Moner, Stanley Tucci. Rating: êjjjj
SO it’s the 10th anniversary of the Transformers franchise. The only cause for celebration is that this fifth instalment of the toysy, boysy, noisy series marks the last time Michael Bay will get his paws on the directorial joystick. Bay has never been known for his subtlety as a filmmaker. If you asked him for something to cut the cake with at a kid’s birthday party, he’d whip out a chainsaw.
For his final duties as Transformers mastermind, Bay has wholeheartedly embraced a less-is-more philosophy: The Last Knight has that rare knack of making less sense the more you focus on it. The script is a whole lot of bits of movies sticky-taped together into a misshapen ball of ear-shrinking explosions and retina-rearranging SFX.
While there is indeed a plot, there is no known way to adequately explain it without the use of MA15+-rated hand gestures and a lot of poop emojis. The action begins in the year 484, where the Transformers buddy up with King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to prevent a total lights-out for all mankind in the Dark Ages. Then we’re out in deep space, where heroic Autobot autocrat Optimus Prime is reprogrammed as a villain, and sent back to Earth to do some antiheroic stuff.
Then we’re back in modern-day America, where all Transformers good and bad have been outlawed by the authorities, and are being hunted down by a mob known as the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF).
Series regular Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg, also departing the franchise after this) is hiding some of his Autobot pals like Bumblebee (soon to get his own spin-off movie, says Bay) in his junkyard. Yeager has also befriended a young orphan Mexican girl (Isabela Moner), and acquired an ancient talisman gadget that the first Transformers gave to Merlin the Wizard (Stanley Tucci) back in the day. Then we cut to England, where a dotty elderly nobleman (Anthony Hopkins) needs that talisman to save the planet from imminent destruction. This eccentric codger also old-man-splains some guff about a secret society of distinguished Transformers confidants.
Past and present members include the likes of Winston Churchill (who asked the Autobots to repel a Nazi invasion in 1942), William Shakespeare and, I kid you not, Professor Stephen Hawking. No mention of Simon Cowell, but we can safely assume he must be on the waiting list.
The random mood swings and roaring brain farts just keep coming. There’s a big brawl involving Transformers, humans and yet more Transformers on the ocean floor. Then there’s another one in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. We are also informed Transformers are the owner-operators of Stonehenge. Hopkins calls someone a d---head for the first and last time in his storied acting career. And there is a cute little Baby Grootlike Transformer that says nothing but the word ‘chihuahua’.