The Gist
Optimus Prime has gone. Humans and Transformers are at all out war with Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg) fighting on the side of the Autobots.
The Review
Before I begin I think I must make this clear – I loved the first Transformers movie.
Love might be a bit much but for the most part, it got things right. A perfect blend of comedy, action, friendship and so on. Then as we know things went quickly downhill, Age of Extinction would have been better received if it was made before (and instead) of Revenge of Fallen and…the third one.
Now though we have Transformers: The Last Knight and like the rest of the world over twenty (I think), I wasn’t too interested, but my job requires me to inform the world regardless so here it is. If you get the feeling I’m hesitating, well you’re right.
Story wise it’s all over the place. There’s an intro scene involving King Arthur, his knights fighting a war they have no chance of winning. Their only hope is the wizard Merlin here played by Stanley Tucci, as for his character Joshua Joyce from Age of Extinction, nothing is mentioned of him. Merlin asks some age old Transformers for help and they do which sets up the events for the rest of the film.
In the present, humans have formed the Transformers Resist Force and are hunting down all of them, regardless of what side they’re on. If you saw the trailer, you would have noticed four young boys meeting a tough as nails no nonsense attitude girl, kinda playing off the excellent Needful Things vibe. Not to worry after a brief intro followed by noise and quick cuts of something happening, they’re no longer seen. The girl Izabella (Isabela Moner) stays behind and befriends Cade, who himself is out to save the robots. However don’t get too involved since she’s quickly forgotten when Cade travels across the globe to meet Anthony Hopkins playing the latest trend of serious actors in small roles only to deliver exposition. No doubt about it Hopkins is having the time of his life here but he’s only there to explain the plot.
One positive thing I can say is that Bay has actually given us a female character that does something, and means something to the plot. Vivienne Wembly (Laura Haddock) is a professor of too many things to type and could be the key to unlocking some thingymajig that could bring the end of days.
You know the rest from here, loads of car chases, that loud crashing “PING!!!!” sound when the Transformers crash, something-something, the end. However, here’s where the problem truly lies with The Last Knight. By the end, all of this felt like a setup for another movie and as we all know there are a few sequels and spin-offs in the works. That’s not a problem at all but when the movies feel like trailers for the next, then I have issues. Another thing is despite what we all think of the movies, some of the action scenes or little sequences were quite cool such as Ironhide leaping over the pedestrian in slo-mo in the first, Prime taking on 3 enemies at once and so on. Here, I got to say despite the chaos and the expensive looking 3D, the action scenes were underwhelming. Maybe it’s to due to the fact I just couldn’t care less about the characters or what was going on. Josh Duhamel makes a return as Lennox and yet, nothing.
The Verdict
I went to see the film with a colleague who’s more into artsy films that no one wants to see on a big screen, you know the type where the whole 90-minute runtime is a single shot of a door and nothing else! Well, I could have done with watching that movie, to be honest.
All that’s left to say is we can trash these movies as much as we want, as proven they’re gonna keep churning these movies out regardless. As for me, I’m done.
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