NOTHING TO SEE HERE
Peter Howell endured the new Transformers flick so you don’t have to.
Transformers: The Last Knight 0 stars (out of 4) Starring Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins and Laura Haddock. Directed by Michael Bay. Opens Wed. at GTA theatres. 148 min. PG Every few years, Michael Bay and his giant digital robots sally forth from their gilded dungeon to inflict damage on the world’s brain cells. Transformers: The Last Knight is their most concerted assault yet, making me fear for the sanity of the planet. Anyone attempting a drinking game whereby shots were consumed for each explosion would be unconscious within 10 minutes. Public showings of this movie, all 148 intolerable minutes of it, should be referred to as bludgeonings rather than screenings.
The fifth in the godawful Transformers franchise, The Last Knight is by far the least of them — and yes, I have seen them all, including Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the previous low-water mark.
I feel confident in declaring The Last Knight to be the worst movie of the sum- mer of 2017, even though summer officially begins just this week and we already have The Mummyand King Arthur: Legend of the Sword setting new standards of cinema crapitude.
These three films, not so coincidentally, all include medieval knights as part of their jumbled narratives, with only King Arthur deserving a pass for doing so (and it manages to screw that up by inserting giant rampaging elephants and other anachronistic elements.
Why don’t these filmmakers just direct Game of Thrones episodes rather than big-screen their TV envy?).
To get back to the beatdown at hand, The Last Knight would have us forget most of what has transpired between alien shape-shifting robots and humans in the four previous films.
That’s OK by me, even though I’m never going to get those 10 hours of my life back, or the nearly 2.5 hours I lost viewing this one. But The Last Knight is not a full series reset.
It’s still essentially the same robotic yadda yadda yadda about snickering Megatron of the evil Decepticons fighting the blowhard Optimus Prime of the righteous Autobots, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance (duh) and numerous human and robot enablers along for a ride that, as per usual, takes in ADHD camera work, unwarranted U.S. jingoism, offensive ethnic stereotypes and crass product placements — Bud Light, anyone?
And Bay and his unholy screenwriting cabal persist in using many of the characters from previous films without tossing a bone to anyone who doesn’t keep a stash of Transformers toys stashed beneath his or her bed. Among them are Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, the Texas inventor/ junkyard owner who has befriended the yellow Chevy Camaro named Bumblebee and other merchandisable Autobots. Also back is John Turturro as comic-relief U.S. government operative Agent Simmons, living in Havana and shouting into the telephone; Josh Duhamel as Colonel William Lennox, a military hard nut who blows things up; and Stanley Tucci in the new guise of drunken wizard Merlin, in the absurd medieval prologue.
New characters include Sir Anthony Hopkins as English lord Sir Edmund Burton, a bloviating egghead who is apparently the only person who understands the plot; Laura Haddock as Oxford professor and designated hottie Vivian Wembley, who confirms Bay’s sexist instincts are fully intact; and Isabela Moner and Jerrod Carmichael as Yeager sidekicks Izabella and Jimmy, whose lack of screen time make them mere checkoffs on a cynical diversity checklist.
The key players in this mess are Wahlberg, Hopkins and Haddock, whose willingness to stare blankly at a CGI green screen while hollering gibberish is exceeded only by the size of the paycheques they’re greedily pocketing. Hopkins at least has the good grace to look bemused by the insanity of a script that takes these Transformers to all points of the Earth and also the Moon, while misappropriating quotations from the likes of Winston Churchill (his “finest hour” speech) and Al Pacino’s Scarface (his “say hello to my little friend” taunt).
For no good reason, The Last Knight decides that the Earth needs a new name, which I’m afraid to reveal lest it be construed as a spoiler by the handful of nerds who might actually care.
But this nadir of filmdom inspired me to invent new words to describe its awfulness. How about “ridicuturg,” as a combination of “ridiculous” and “turgid.” Or maybe “ludicring,” as a combo of “ludicrous” and “boring.” Such wordplay helped me while away the last 20 minutes of The Last Knight, when it seemed that everyone was suspended in space screaming at each other and throwing stuff. It was either that, or having my brain explode.
The stars’ willingness to (holler) gibberish is exceeded only by the size of the paycheques they’re greedily pocketing