A Knight to forget
THE best thing about Transformers: The Last Knight is that it means Guy Ritchie’s recent flop King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is no longer the worst movie made about the Camelot legend.
Yes, that’s right, Michael Bay’s latest big robots action movie is partly based on the King Arthur legend because, well, why not take a big steaming dump on that story as well?
Only Bay could shoot a sequence set in the dark ages and fill it with more explosions than Pearl Harbor.
Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth in the big budget franchise, is pretty much everything you might expect it to be, which may be good or bad depending on your perspective.
Ever since Optimus Prime left to travel back to the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron, chaos has reigned on Earth as the leaderless Autobots and Decepticons skirmish aimlessly all over the planet.
Transformers are now outlaws in most parts of the world, so a group of Autobots are in hiding at a remote junkyard with their human buddy Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), who has recently come into possession of a strange talisman.
The military agency charged with hunting down rogue Transformers, the TRF, wants the talisman so – quite inexplicably – they do a deal with Megatron to set free a bunch of captured Decepticons from robot jail and let them do the dirty work. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right? Meanwhile, Cyberton is rushing towards Earth on a collision course and the only way to stop it is to find the magical MacGuffin Staff, or something.
The plot is a gigantic mess. I’m not even sure the writers knew what was going on. The story is packed full of irrelevant tangents and pointless characters, like young Izzy (Isabella Moner) who is introduced very early on, and with great fanfare, only to be essentially relegated to backstage for nearly the entire remainder of the movie.
I was trying to keep track of every massive, crippling plot hole as they happened but by halfway through I just gave up, I couldn’t keep count. And I was far too baffled by the excessive and ridiculous wardrobe changes by archaeologist and leading lady Vivian (Laura Haddock). Seriously, was she carrying a suitcase around with her?
There are a couple of shining lights in the darkness, though. The film includes a number of good nods to the original animated Transformers movie from 1986, which shows that the writers at least have a good grasp of the source material.
And then they blow it with some weirdly brazen rip-offs from other movies, including military drones that look suspiciously like TIE fighters from Star Wars, and the character Cogman, who resembles a certain gold android.
“What’s this C3PO ripoff doing here?” one Autobot asks. I was wondering the same thing.
We see the usual cluster of Bayisms here: excessive shakycam, excessive slow motion, leering camera shots of the female protagonist, awful speeches by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), racist stereotype robots, and so on and so forth.
And then there is the other major failing of these movies: they are never about the Transformers.
The stories are always driven by and focus on, the humans of the piece. The Transformers are essentially ornamental, big shiny props that just turn up to fight each other occasionally when things get slow and boring.
With the possible exception of Prime’s encounter on Cybertron (in which he is more passive tourist than protagonist, anyway) the Transformers don’t actually drive the plot at all. And in terms of overall screen time, we don’t even see much of them. Instead all the focus and all the plotting rests on the humans, who are so mind-numbingly uninteresting, I didn’t care if any of them lived or died, either.
At some point quite early on, the Transformers movies just stopped being fun.
The first movie, which came out 10 years ago, was at least a silly, loopy joyride of an action movie that was aimed squarely at kids and ageing nerds. But here we are at the fifth instalment, with a bladder-busting two-and-ahalf-hour runtime and a nearly incomprehensible storyline full of swearing, meaning it isn’t even really a kids’ movie any more.
At some point they started pitching these flicks at the sort of boofheads who think the Fast and Furious movies are works of genius.
To its credit, it doesn’t feel quite as long as it is but the plot is such a disaster that the ultrasonic pace is the only thing stopping it from falling apart at the seams.
Transformers: The Last Knight is truly awful, a lazily written piece of cynical filmmaking. But who cares, right? It’ll make a bajillion dollars at the box office, anyway.
Thankfully Michael Bay has said this will be the last one he directs. There will be more, but with someone else at the helm, maybe the next one will be worth watching. Now showing at Village Cinemas and Cmax, rated M. Rating: BOMB