Review – Transformers: The Last Knight

Michael Bay is back to blow up our senses and ruin our childhoods in Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth installment of the Transformers franchise.  This is an incredibly long, ridiculously loud, brain-numbing film that requires at least six Advil after the movie is finished.

During past Transformers films, the headaches would be caused by the sheer amount of action, sound, special effects, and editing all jumbled into one wild, two and a half hour mess.  However, The Last Knight is a little different.  Sure, the action sequences are loud, colorful, and heavily edited, but they didn’t happen nearly as often, nor weren’t as insane as past films.  No, this Transformers film has easily the most ridiculous, convoluted, messy plot of any of the films.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Who goes to Transformers movies for the plot?”  Excellent question.  I usually don’t.  I know that Bay doesn’t focus on character development or plot points and focuses all of his attention on visuals, which, if there is one great thing about the Transformers franchise, it is the special effects and visuals that are always highlighted during the action sequences.  But like I said in the paragraph above, the action sequences don’t happen nearly as often.  In fact, the film is rather lackluster in terms of its action.  Even when the action happens, they aren’t as explosive as in the past, causing minimal collateral damage, and isn’t the point of a Transformers movie to rack up as much collateral damage as possible?  The final showdown is pretty wild, but at that point in the movie, I was just hoping the movie would end.

So without the action, the movie focuses a lot on its absurd plot, which I honestly have no idea what was going on.  From what I got, it starts in The Dark Ages with King Arthur, where Merlin (Stanley Tucci, why do you do this to yourself?) is a fake wizard who got his powers from the Transformers.  They used these powers to secure victory during their fiercest battles.  Merlin got his powers from a staff that would be buried with him when he died.  Now, 1600 years later, an evil Transformer named Quintessa (Gemma Chan) wants to take over earth and needs the staff because it is the only thing that can stop her.  She hypnotizes Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) to be evil and help with her search of the staff, which forces Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), Bumblebee, and the rest of the Transformers and U.S. military must come together to stop Earth from being destroyed.

There is more to the movie than just that, but that’s all I could really understand.  There is some subplot about the government banning Transformers or something and the Decepticons show up every nine or ten scenes to cause chaos and mayhem.  I don’t really know.  The cutting of the movie was so fast and so erratic that I couldn’t keep track of what was actually happening, and the exposition, though a lot, was mumbled all over the place.  One scene is one plot, the next is another, the next is another that we don’t come back to, the next is back to the first one.  The movie is like putting together a 30 piece puzzle when some of the pieces are missing; it isn’t complicated, but all the pieces need to be there for it to make sense.

The actors are worthless and their characters are just there to fill in space.  Wahlberg is so dumb it is insulting.  His line delivery is some of the worst of his career.  Hopkins just does whatever he wants and says crazy old-man things.  Laura Haddock plays a history teacher who is incredibly attractive, yet can’t get a boyfriend (ha!) until she meets Cade and the two are so opposite they start to like each other.  The amount of chemistry between the two is about the same as the intelligence in this movie: none.  Isabella Moner plays the sassy little 14 year old mechanic named Izzy who just shows up in random places and either yells or cries.  John Turturro makes an appearance as well, and it is sad to see him like this.

The finale fight when the hypnotized Optimus Prime is comes to earth to wreck house starts off cool, but ends in the same anti-climactic fashion of Batman fighting Superman in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) (yes, it was the Transformers version of “Martha!”).  This moment literally made me shake my head.  What a waste of cool moment and the cherry on top of all the stupidity in this movie.

There is a part towards the end of the film where sassy Izzy has snuck her way onto a military plane on there way to help blow up Quintessa’s mega-ship thing that is destroying Earth.  It is a complete shit show and complete chaos.  Yeager opens the bag she has hidden in and asks, “What are you doing here?!” to which Izzy replies, “I don’t know.”  If someone had asked me this question while I was sitting in the theater, I would have had the same answer.  I don’t know why I was there, all I know is that I was and I was in the middle of a chaotic shit-storm, much like Izzy.

Did you see Transformers: The Last Knight?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.