So I could copy and paste my review of every other Transformers movie for my review of Transformers: The Last Knight… but I won’t. I will say many of the same things but I’d also add this is slightly more entertaining than some of them, but only because it goes off the rails with a plot even more absurd than every before. And I’m not sure if they realized it or not.
So the new Transformers starts back in the dark ages where King Arthur and his knights are fighting a war against invading Saxons. Merlin has to confront a transformer in an ancient crashed ship so he can borrow a magic staff and command a three-headed robot dragon to defend Camelot. Then, in the modern day, Mark Whalberg has to find a magic amulet that will lead him to a book that will lead him to Merlin’s staff in order to stop the end of the world (as was foretold in prophecy). Bring in Pangea blah blah blah and Stonehenge blah blah blah and a random pointless WW2 sequence that blows away even more of the series continuity and you have one huge swirling mish-mash of stuff. Optimus Prime turns evil and sits most of the movie out, the transformers are being hunted by the governments of the world (again), Chicago takes a beating (again), and Cybertron threatens the Earth (again).
Part of me thinks there was a writer on this movie that knew it was just one big joke and others who didn’t. And somehow the weird, silly Merlin’s staff stuff kind of makes the movie, possibly accidentally, somewhat entertaining. It can’t stop the movie from being an endless 2 1/2 hours and for action scenes to somehow go on so long they get boring, repetitious, and tedious. And why would they? It’s a Transformers movie.
The tone of the movie is, as usual, all over the map… any time someone opens their yap to say something, it’s either super self-serious, weird, script-writing 101, or just random, inexplicable humor. For example, the opening super violent war between King Arthur and the Saxon invaders gets interrupted by a drunk Merlin asking a transformer for a magic staff. As soon as he opens his yap, whatever serious and kind of cool stuff that was happening gets chucked out the window. It turns into a Monty Python movie suddenly. An important character dies and a long-lived robot says, “of all the beings I have served, you were the coolest.” Coolest? Sigh.
As usual, the action is well shot and looks great – they put every ounce of their budget on screen. But, as usual, its sheer noise and cacophony… Somehow with all this budget, they can’t makes the action work, at least not for me. But I can’t deny that the FX team, the cinematographer, and the other technical movie makers have skill and they put it all on screen.
Also, to anyone hoping they’d be given a bad-ass teen girl that’s in every trailer… she’s in the first 30-40 minutes of the movie and then she’s ejected from the plot. Then she comes back in the last 15-20 minutes but doesn’t do anything. It’s almost false advertising… but too many more shots of a 14 year old with her budding body running in creepy Michael Bay slow-mo might make the movie a little tasteless.
So, yeah, this is yet another Transformers movie. It has a grand, even sillier plot than before and you might buy into that or it might make the movie even more insufferable than ever. Since I suspect that someone on the team has realized something about these movies, I kind of decided to be amused by it. So the movie isn’t an utter disaster. Its WAY too long to be entertaining enough to watch for that reason though
Score: 64