A film that leaves you dazed and confused Transformers: The Last Knight

Director:Michael Bay Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel Michael Bay is back with slaughtered and their cause another mammoth budget isn’t helped by their wizard to throw at the screen in the Merlin, who is far away from latest Transformers monthe battlefields and completestrosity. The Last Knight is ly sozzled. actually a distinct improveSomehow, he has stumbled ment on its predecessor, Age on an alien ship crashed on of Extinction, but it’s still an a mountain top. The Transexperience which leaves you former lurking within enpunch drunk and groggy as trusts him with a magic staff you try to work out what on and allows him to use a giant earth it is all about. metallic dragon. So far, so

Then, there’s the plot which preposterous. For a few brief whisks us from England in moments, as the dragon joins the Dark Ages to outer space the fight, it seems as if we’ve and back again, and which stumbled into an episode of even features a scene in Nazi Game of Thrones. Germany. Arthur and the Knights of

Working on the theory that the Round Table have chivit’s always good to start with alrous Autobots fighting by a battle, Bay opens the movie their side. The robots see at with King Arthur and his Camelot what humans can be. knights pitted against vastly The Last Knight benefits superior forces in some soggy from the British connection. forest. They look bound to be Bay could be moonlighting for the tourist board. We get to see the white cliffs of Dover, the glittering spires of Oxford University, Northumbrian castles, Stonehenge and the usual London landmarks.

Anthony Hopkins is wonderfully unflappable as Sir Edmund Burton, a tweedy, upper-class academic who knows all about the Transformers and has his own Jeeves-like robot. He keeps his calm however absurd the lines the screenplay serves up or extreme the danger that Megatron and the Decepticons put him in. Burton is the first one to sense that the world is going to end.

Laura Haddock co-stars as glamorous university history professor who drives a sports car, plays polo between lectures and is very sceptical about far-fetched stories involving knights of yore. She is single (as conveniently is Wahlberg’s Cade.) Her mother’s bridge-playing friends try very hard to set her up with some suitable man or woman.

The basic plot here is similar to that of the underwhelming recent Tom Cruise reboot of The Mummy. Instead of a sacred dagger, the main McGuffin here is a missing staff given to Merlin in ancient times by the Bots. This holds the key to power over both earth and the distant planet of Cybertron, ruled over by the hissing hologram-like Quintessa, the Transformers’ answer to the Wicked Witch of the East.

Generally heroic in the previous movies, Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen but sounding more and more like Liam Neeson) has gone over to the dark side and is ready to destroy Earth to rescue his own planet.

No one could ever accuse Bay of skimping on the spectacle. That, though, is part of the problem. The action is more or less unceasing. The Autobots and Decepticons turn into sports cars and rocket planes. There are lots of slow-motion explosions.

At one of the most dangerous moments, aboard a submarine deep beneath the waves, Cade and Laura take a few moments off from trying to save the world to enjoy a candlelit dinner together. Just as some of the robots are missing parts, some of the characters here behave as if the screenwriters haven’t quite worked out how to finish off constructing them. There’s a teenage girl who comes from nowhere and has almost as much talent for communicating with the Autobots as Cade himself. He clearly sees her as a surrogate for the daughter he has been forced to leave behind. It appears as if she will have a major role in the film but she is then sidelined until the final reel.

Far too much is going on— and far too little. This is a franchise that is put together in such random, haphazard fashion that it can probably go on forever. Just as the Autobots can change shape at will, the films have infinite possibilities for mutating and reinventing themselves. THE INDEPENDENT