Transformers: The Last Knight
Michael Bay clearly takes pride in making movies critics don’t like.
That said, Transformers: The Last Knight offers little for noncritics as well, beyond lame innuendo that will mystify tots and annoy their parents. Fans of the old television cartoon will roll their eyes. Bay and a legion of writers (including Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman, A Beautiful Mind) have bent the mythology out of shape, introducing new characters who — be they flesh or metal — aren’t very interesting.
While anyone who buys a ticket to see a movie about a tractor trailer that turns into an extraterrestrial robot knows better than to expect James Joycean insight into the human condition, Bay manages to make
the metamorphic spectacle of mundane machines turning into evil Decepticons or benign Autobots banal. To his credit, Bay actually tries to throw medieval British mythology into the mix, but the prologue somberly narrated by Sir Anthony Hopkins seems shoehorned into a story about space robots: In ye olde days, Merlin (Stanley Tucci) apparently acquired a magic staff from a Transformer.
A millennium and a half later, a brainwashed Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen) has been sent from his dilapidated home planet of Cybertron to retrieve Merlin’s staff without knowing that it’s part of a plot to drain the earth of what’s left of its resources. Meanwhile, Decepticon Megatron (voice of Frank Welker) is also after the staff as are frustrated inventor Cade Yeager (a shaggy, corporeal Mark Wahlberg) and medieval historian Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock).
That sounds simple enough, but Bay has a gift for making simple ideas complicated and for losing a viewer’s attention as if he, too, has been getting bored with the cinematic clutter he has created. It’s fitting that he has placed Cade in a junkyard because much of Transformers: The Last Knight feels as if it has been haphazardly assembled from spare parts that aren’t even from the same type of machine. It’s as if Bay has a phobia against prioritizing portions of his narrative or even making a point.
Because of his eagerness to leap from subject to subject, it’s hard to follow or even care how the multiple strands of the thin story are going. During the battles, it’s impossible to tell if a combatant is an Autobot or a Decepticon. Oh, there’s lots of exposition to go with the expected Michael Bay explosions and property damage, but it seems pointless to hire Sir Anthony to simply give garbled history lessons. The ’bots have familiar voices, like those of John Goodman or Steve Buscemi, but the writers don’t give them anything witty to say (unless you count jokes involving feces), and the sound engineers bury the actors’ unique inflections under a lot of metal-sounding noise.
All of this might have been more fun if Bay had a sense of humor, but he has a moth-to-flame attraction to every corny aside imaginable. For example, Hopkins informs Wahlberg that he was born to be a knight because he, well, hasn’t known the tender embrace of a woman for some time. Most of The Last Knight is somber and apocalyptic. That sort of tone was ideal for 13 Hours, Bay’s film about a tragedy at Bengazi, but here it seems as if he has missed a dose of Prozac.
Perhaps the ideal to experience the delights that Transformers have to offer would be eliminate the middlemen like Bay and simply splurge on the toys. Hasbro would certainly appreciate your business, and the children in your life could probably come up with something more entertaining than what Goldsman and company have delivered.