Transformers 5: stuck in the mud
After that brief “historical” prologue, we’re back in the present day, as mankind is working on destroying the remaining Transformers – giant alien robots who have existed for millennia.
The machines do have a couple of flesh-and-blood allies: Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), for example, a mechanic who lives in a junkyard, where he uses his skills to repair his buddies when they break down.
For reasons not worth getting into, Cade ends up on the run from both the government and the most malicious of the Transformers, Megatron (voiced by Frank Welker). In the midst of the chase, our hero gets intercepted by a dapper robot-butler named Cogman (Downton Abbey’s Jim Carter), who delivers Cade to the elderly eccentric Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins), a man claiming to know the secret to ending the war between humans and machines.
The screenplay checks off all the requisite boxes: Precocious kid? Check. Cute robot? Kooky old man? Cartoonish heroes? Dastardly villains? A good guy who becomes a bad guy (but only for a little while)? They’re all here, including a comically out-of-place love story that develops between Cade and a brilliant academic (Laura Haddock) who, upon being kidnapped by Sir Edmund (in a non-violent way, of course) decides to slip out of a very practical outfit into a tight, cleavage-baring cocktail dress – which she just happened to have with her.
She and Cade have a little Elizabeth Bennet/mr Darcy thing going on – minus the witty repartee. At one point, Cade, belittling her, refers to her “stripper dress”. Director Michael Bay apparently thinks that calling attention to her idiotic costume inoculates him against complaints of sexism. It doesn’t.
It’s hardly the worst offence in a movie that’s cut like the world’s longest and most tedious trailer, pinballing from scene to scene and rarely spending more than a few seconds on any single shot.
The Last Knight bounces from the US to the planet Cybertron to London to Cuba to under the sea, as if hurrying to squeeze in even more confusing plot details.
Wahlberg and Hopkins race through their lines, clearly trying to spit them out before the camera cuts away. It’s no use. A lot of dialogue gets lost.
Not that it matters. The script is nothing special and, besides, the movie is really aimed at a global audience, hungry for empty action.
Watching Transformers is like sitting in a car that’s revving its engine while stuck in the mud. It sounds like it’s getting somewhere, even though all it ever does is spin its wheels. – The Washington Post