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MOVIE: Bumblebee STARS: Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Martin Short, Pamela Adlon, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. RATING: PG

REVIEWER: Wenlei Ma

GOING into Bumblebee, there are two competing sets of expectations.

On the one hand, it’s a Transformers movie so it’s probably going to be a bloated and ridiculous mess like its predecessors. On the other hand, it’s directed by Travis Knight, the man who made the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings, an emotionally sophisticated and charming animated feature.

The question then becomes whether Knight’s creative instincts would be crushed by the behemoth of the unthinking Transformers franchise.

The result? Bumblebee ,a Transformers prequel set in the 1980s, is surprisingly serviceable. Most of the time, it’s actually quite fun and absorbing, due in large part to an appealing performance from Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie Watson, a punk-loving, mechanically inclined teen who discovers an old, yellow VW Beetle in a scrap yard. A car that happens to be a Transformer in disguise.

When two Decepticons (Dropkick and Shatter) follow Bumblebee’s signal to Earth, it unleashes a showdown between the alien-robots, one battle in the universe-sized war waging in the cosmos.

But when Bumblebee shifts to this ongoing war between Decepticons and Autobots on Cybertron, it loses all meaning, a boring mishmash of CGI and tiresome exposition.

If only Bumblebee could’ve done away with all the silly Transformers stuff altogether – it would’ve been much better movie if such a thing was possible.