Transformers
“That is the dumbest idea you could possibly imagine,” one character says at some point, and it seems as if director Michael Bay used that line as inspiration.
The film actually starts on a high note, in England during the Middle Ages. King Arthur is in battle, he’s getting trounced and they’re all waiting on the arrival of Merlin, who is a hopeless drunk. But he’s played by Stanley Tucci, and he’s actually terrific, totally in on the joke that is this movie, having a ball. So do we, for about five minutes.
Careful observers will note that there were no cars in the Middle Ages. But there were Transformers, evidently, only they don’t actually transform, so why would they be called that?
Don’t ask. In fact, don’t ask any questions about the plot, because there are no answers, because there is no plot.
Oh, there are plot strands, lots of them. These include Optimus Prime trying to find his roots on another planet. (When he’s told he’s going to meet his maker, I thought, Henry Ford? Alas, no.) That doesn’t go as planned.
Man is at war with Transformers, and Transformers are sort of at war with each other, I think. Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is living in a junk yard with a spunky kid (Isabela Moner) and baby dragon Transformers and grown-up Transformers, but they’re all in hiding, sort of, but not really, from the new branch of the armed services that’s rounding up Transformers. This is how Josh Duhamel, who plays Col. William Lennox, shows up again, but he seems to have some affinity for the enemy. Yet so, sometimes, does the entire Army.
To say it’s confusing is to put more thought into the film than it deserves or demands. But I digress. Cade is given a kind of talisman by a dying Transformer knight (remember, Merlin and all that). Meanwhile Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins, to which the only question one can ask is: why?) is the keeper of some sort of secret society of geniuses and heroes who have for centuries hidden the secret of Transformers. Sometimes he talks on the phone with John Turturro, who is in Cuba.
Then there’s Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), whose character progresses thusly: She plays polo, rushes off to change, trips in heels on her way into a building where ... she teaches students at Oxford. So she’s a polo-playing uncoordinated genius, maybe, except she never again trips or shows any other signs of being uncoordinated. Don’t ask why. Just don’t. Wait. I forgot the submarine. If there is a point to all this, it’s the same as every movie like this ever made: a deadly weapon must be kept out of the wrong hands. Now you tell us. It’s all ridiculous, of course, which by now has to be part of the point. One of my favorite parts is how Bay offers up an attimes melodramatic score to provide emotional cues, as if we weren’t watching animated tin cans in action. Then again, in the screening I attended people applauded when Optimus Prime did something routinely heroic, so what do I know?
I know this, actually. Bay and Wahlberg have said this will be their last installment in the franchise. The studio should follow their lead, and put this wretched series out of our misery.