Transformers: Age of Extinction is a terrible, terrible movie…. and a terrible Transformers movie too. 2hrs 45 minutes of incomprehensible action… which is somehow even flabbier than the previous movies (seriously, no sense of space, explosions and chaos that seems completely disconnected from anything we’ve seen before, etc.) It’s so incredibly LONG and has too much stuff going on, yet not enough plot… to the point where there are three competing sets of bad guys and, at the two hour point, you look at your watch and realize you still have to deal with the other bad guys while in the middle of a nonsensical street fight that is otherwise unrelated to that other group. Ugh.

The movie ejects the old cast and replaces them with Mark Whalberg as the world’s least convincing Texas farmer/roboticist (this is Whalberg in Bad Actor mode), Stanley Tucci as Not-Steve-Jobs, Kelsey Grammer as Government Spook, and the latest pair of daisy dukes (this isn’t me being sexist, the camera is very good at focusing). Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are back… and are joined by new stereotype robots voiced by John Goodman and Ken Watanabe (noble samurai transformer).

Are there dinobots in this movie? Yes… sorta. Eventually.

The surprising thing is that the movie sometimes has terrible special effects… which is not something I could ever say about the previous movies. You could always see the money on the screen. Some of this looks great but other FX just look terrible.

The movie seems to want to have something to say about terrorism, illegal immigration, and drone warfare… and then panders to the Chinese government (“The Central Government will defend Hong Kong!” someone actually says while Hong Kong is under attack… and then they never actually show up and do anything… what?). Speaking of which, the movie shows us that Chicago is rebuilding after the last movie (and they show shots of ruined buildings early on) and then, later the movie takes place in Chicago and nothing is ruined or remotely any different than it is today… what kind of incompetent film making is this? Why mention the damage and destruction and then skip it… or why set a big action set piece in the same city as the last movie?

Also, the movie promises a sequel in ways the previous movies didn’t. Meaning that this movie is focused on setting up sequels by having elements that have no pay off in this film (stuff that adds to the running time).

I guess on the good side, some of the more immature comedy is gone leaving a more serious movie… except for the juvenile and supposedly funny and out-of-place banter about dads and daughters and their terrible boyfriends (you know, joking about while suspended on mooring cables between an alien space ship and the Sears Tower – exactly when real people would start bantering). Optimus Prime is a cynical jerk too.

This is a really terrible movie, but I knew that going in and you know if you want to see it and if you’ll like it regardless. So what then? Well, I’ll admit to finding some elements of the 1st and 3rd movies have some merit in between their nonsensical, incomprehensible bang ’em up action. So I had some vague hope that maybe they could pull something good off again with a partial reset. Nope.