Movie Review: Transformers: The Last Knight

Transformers: The Last Knight ½ / *****

Directed by: Michael Bay.

Written by: Art Marcum & Matt Holloway & Ken Nolan and Akiva Goldsman.

Starring: Mark Wahlberg (Cade Yeager), Anthony Hopkins (Sir Edmund Burton), Josh Duhamel (Colonel William Lennox), Laura Haddock (Vivian Wembley), Gemma Chan (Quintessa), Santiago Cabrera (Santos), Isabela Moner (Izabella), Jerrod Carmichael (Jimmy), Stanley Tucci (Merlin), John Turturro (Agent Simmons), Tony Hale (JPL Engineer), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Frank Welker (Megatron), Erik Aadahl (Bumblebee), John Goodman (Hound), Ken Watanabe (Drift), Jim Carter (Cogman), Steve Buscemi (Daytrader), Omar Sy (Hot Rod), Reno Wilson (Mohawk / Sqweeks), John DiMaggio (Nitro Zeus / Crosshairs), Tom Kenny (Wheels), Jess Harnell (Barricade). 

 

Is Michael Bay secretly an Avant-garde director, throwing narrative out the window in favor a purely sensory experience? His latest film – Transformers: The Last Knight (the fifth in the franchise) is all sound and fury – special effects and noise for two and half hours, and there is not a single element of the plot that makes the slightest bit of sense, or even tries to really. If I understand the plot, it’s basically this: It starts with a flashback to ancient times – a battle involving King Arthur and his knights – and Merlin – and a lot of explosions (for some reason). From there, we flash forward to the series’ new hero – Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) – who helped saved the world in the last film, and is now hiding out in this one. Optimus Prime is hurtling through outer space on his way back to his home planet – where he will eventually meet some strange robot woman who wants to destroy Earth – and brainwashes Optimus to help her. Back on earth, Yaeger is one of the only humans who still likes the Transformers – they have been outlawed – and will eventually head to England for some reason, where he meets Sir Edmund Burton – who tells his the history of Transformers on Earth (did you know they killed Hitler?) and Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock) – the last surviving descendant of Merlin, which is important because they need her to be able to wield his magical staff, which is humanity’s only hope. Jesus Christ, just writing that gave me a headache.

 

Bay takes this overly convoluted story, and buries it under two and half hours of loud, incoherent action sequences. The first film in this series was actually kind of fun – it scratched that nostalgia itch for children of the 1980s like myself, and was basically big, loud, dumb fun. Since then, Bay has taken this series to further and further extremes. He seems to have no interest in narrative or dialogue or characters, or anything other filming scene after scene of CGI crap crashing into each other. He has a talented cast to be sure, but they don’t really exist as anything other than props.

 

A small, perverse part of me kind of admires Michael Bay for making films like this. No, they are not good, and I find them to be loud, obnoxious, boring and cynical. And yet, we do live in a blockbuster culture in which almost all movies made at this budget look and sound the same, and tell the same stories again and again and again – there is a numbing sameness to it all. And Michael Bay, lord love him, doesn’t do that. He is off doing his own thing – spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create whatever the hell this is. I have liked some of Bay’s films in the past – I actually really, really like Pain & Gain – with Mark Wahlberg, The Rock and Anthony Mackie as three idiot criminals – and even parts of this series – I already mentioned I liked the first film in the series, and there is a good 45 minute chuck of the third one that works quite well. But I hated every minute of this film – which is the worst of the franchise and perhaps the point that Bay has been building to all along.

 

For that, I still have to hand it to Bay – it takes something (whether that’s skill or not is debatable) to make a movie this expensive and make me actively hate it this much. Most of the time, when blockbusters fail they do so in dull, boring ways. Transformers: The Last Knight fails in spectacular fashion. Bravo, I guess.