Total Bayhem as £200m Transformers blast back
THERE are Mediterranean cruises shorter than this movie, the fifth in the lucrative Transfomers franchise. Or so it begins to seem, after you have watched the umpteenth sports car turning into a robot, which then loudly bashes up another robot, making the whole cinema shudder.
And I saw it in full IMAX 3D sensory overload. Never have I felt less like a member of the audience and more like collateral damage.
But credit where it is due. Director Michael Bay, in bringing us another barrage of so-called ‘Bay- hem’, certainly proves his mastery of the spectacular. There are some impressive effects in this two-and-a-half hour film, as perhaps there should be in a project costing more than £200 million. If only he knew when to stop.
The story begins in England in the Dark Ages, which are not all that dark, actually, owing to the number of explosions lighting up the sky.
With King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword and The Mummy so regrettably fresh in the memory, I’ve rather had my fill of Arthurian England, though at least this version brings us Stanley Tucci, camping it up riotously as the wizard Merlin.
Also in common with those other two films, as if it were the last in some unholy trilogy, the plot of
Transformers: The Last Knight revolves semi- coherently around a sacred relic which everyone, goodies and baddies alike, need to find if they are to save/destroy (delete as applicable) the world.
In this case it’s a mystical staff, handed to Merlin by an obliging robot in a crashed spaceship. With a helpful voiceover from none other than Anthony Hopkins — ‘two species at war, one flesh, one metal’, he intones solemnly — we then skip forward 1,600 years to the modern day.
Here, Mark Wahlberg is back as blue-collar hero Cade Yeager, who hooks up with Hopkins himself, enjoyably hammy as plummy English aristocrat Sir Edmund Burton, to find the staff. They are aided by Laura Haddock’s gloriously improbable Oxford academic, the beautiful and conveniently single Vivian Wembley, who makes Cade’s knees go all trembly.
Can this resourceful human trio help the noble Autobots (whose leader Optimus Prime has turned rotten) defeat the fiendish Decepticons? I stopped caring about half an hour in.
Still, with John Turturro as a boffin hiding out for no very clear reason in Cuba, and John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and Jim Carter voicing robots (the latter as Sir Edmund’s butler, a robotic version of Downton’s Mr Carson) there are reasons enough to look and listen as the Bayhem unfolds.
Good luck.