A good Knight, amid the Bayhem
prologue featuring King Arthur, Merlin, a battle ripped off from Gladiator and a whacking great dragon, then you’ll at least understand that this is not a film to be prejudged. For the first few minutes at least I truly thought I was watching the trailer for another film.
The story has the Transformers’ home planet under the control of some sort of multi- limbed cosmic witch and on a collision course with Earth. Standing between us and doom are Mark Wahlberg, joined by polo-playing professor of history Laura Haddock and a cravatwearing Anthony Hopkins as a castle-dwelling aristocrat with the secrets of the ages in his libraries.
John Turturro and Stanley Tucci return from previous instalments. And Bay finally gives Wahlberg something to do except look angsty and get beaten up. Wahlberg is too often cast as some sort of cut-rate Matt Damon substitute, but he has superb comic timing when it’s called for and he drops a couple of lines that bring the house down here, usually directed against pint-sized and gleefully sociopathic robot butler Cogman, voiced – hilariously – by Downton Abbey’s Jim Carter.
The Last Knight is an unashamedly daft film. It chucks in plot points from Independence Day, The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure, takes design cues – acknowledged – from Star Wars and Robocop, while referencing True Romance, Blade Runner and Scarface among countless others. I’m pretty sure there’s a sly dig at Ridley Scott’s overblown and zero-fun Prometheus in there as well.
Maybe The Last Knight got me at the right time. On another day that numbing running time and Bay’s legendary inability to show any woman without objectifying her, or any non-white character without making them a caricature, might have been enough to make me dislike this film quite a lot. But tonight it seems to me that with The Last Knight, Bay has relocated the franchise’s mojo. It’s a fun watch. And right now, that’ll do. – Graeme Tuckett