No stars (turkey). Rated PG-13, for relentless sci-fi action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.23.17
This isn’t even a good video
game.
As a movie, it’s a $260 million
disaster.
 |
| When Col. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) inexplicably decides that the über-evil Megatron might help U.S. forces find some all-important Transformers tech, he okays the release of a ferocious quartet of evil Decepticons. Which immediately start fragging every human being in sight. Like, anybody expected otherwise? |
Actually, the term movie doesn’t even apply. Movies have
plots. And characters. This cacophonous monument of soulless wretched excess
has neither.
I’m frankly astonished that Art
Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan and Akiva Goldsman have the audacity to claim
credit for a script. The spoken lines in this junkyard dog are so sparse —
often limited to monosyllabic exhortations such as “We’ve got to go!,” “Hang
on!,” “Good job!” and “Jump!” — and the action so haphazard, that one could
watch the entire 149-minute mess with the dialog track eliminated entirely, and
have just as much success trying to extract meaning from the bonkers narrative.
That also would spare us from the
faux profundities in the film’s hilariously overwrought voice-over narration.
The Monty Python gang, at their prime, could not have concocted more
ludicrously silly monologues. But helmer Michael Bay intends us to take them
seriously.
Bay began his career as a
director of music videos, and it could be argued — particularly during the past
decade — that he never shifted gears. Such video shorts are no more than a
series of flamboyant, hyper-edited visuals solely in service of the music; with
very rare exception, there’s no such thing as “story” or “character.”
The same could be said of Transformers: The L(e)ast Knight, fifth
entry in this increasingly dismal franchise, which is no more than an overlong
showcase reel for numerous special effects companies. Bay couldn’t care less
about story, and he obviously couldn’t care less about character; his notion of
an “emotional moment” starts and stops with a tight-tight-tight close-up of a given actor’s face, always bearing a silent,
stricken, gape-mouthed expression. Pause and hold for what seems an eternity.
Tears are optional (but desired).
The result would be laughable, if
the process of watching the damn thing weren’t so relentlessly repetitious,
predictable, exhausting and tediously dull.
Bay doesn’t make movies; he makes
product. Noisy,
lowest-common-denominator trash designed for an indiscriminate international
market.
Expensive and impressively
mounted trash, to be fair ... but trash nonetheless.
The plot, such as it is:
Continuing where the previous
film left off, the United States — and, one assumes, the rest of the world —
has become a war zone where even the good-guy Transformers (Autobots) are no
longer trusted, and hunted down by government-sanctioned military forces. The
noble Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), the Transformer ambassador who
maintained cordial relations between humans and robots, is journeying through
space, in an attempt to revive the remnants of his dead home world, Cybertron.
With Optimus Prime gone, the evil
Decepticon leader — Megatron — has his own designs on what to do with Earth;
the plot involves obtaining a medallion and Merlin’s magical staff. Yes, the
Merlin of Arthurian myth, which gives Bay an excuse for a numb-nuts prologue
that finds a three-headed dragon Transformer saving England for the Knights of
the Round Table. (Don’t ask.)
Actually, that’s only the beginning.
We later discover that the Allies only won World War II because of Autobot
support and a nasty, watch-size Transformer that killed Adolf Hitler.
Anyway...
Good guy Cade Yeager (Mark
Wahlberg) has been repairing and sheltering benevolent Autobots for the past
several years, in a desert-based junkyard. The place is guarded by all sorts of
comedy-relief Autobots, such as the whining, pack-rat Daytrader (Steve Buscemi)
and the (metal) cigar-chomping, mercenary-esque Hound (John Goodman).
Yep, it has come to this: Joke
Transformers. Three Stooges time.
Cade is further saddled with
Izabella (Isabela Moner), an adolescent orphan who’s pretty handy at repairing
robots herself, donchaknow.
Meanwhile, across the pond, the
aristocratic Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) is the latest — and last — in
a centuries-long line of “protectors” who have safeguarded Transformer secrets,
in order to prevent a dire prophesy that somehow involves Stonehenge. Sir
Edmund is assisted by a cranky butler Autobot named Cogman (voiced by Jim
Carter, in his richest Mr. Carson/Downton
Abbey cadence).
Sir Edmund knows that Cade is the
“chosen one” selected to wear the medallion when the Decepticon merde hits the fan. Except that equal
responsibility falls to university historian Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock),
who — wouldn’t you just know it — is directly descended from Merlin, and
therefore the only one who can wield his staff.
I therefore couldn’t tell you
whether Cade or Vivian is the actual “last knight.” I don’t think the scripters
know either.
Elsewhere, in Cuba, Agent Simmons
(John Turturro) spends a few scenes yelling at Sir Edmund over the phone. (Yep;
that’s it. Yelling into a phone booth phone.) Turturro’s character has appeared
throughout most of the series, albeit in larger roles; I can’t imagine why he
was limited to such a pointless cameo here. Maybe Bay’s special effects-laden
budget precluded hiring the actor full-time.
God knows, the scripters couldn’t
have concocted anything intelligent for the character to do anyway, so it
really doesn’t matter.
Back in outer space, Optimus
Prime has reached Cybertron, and his creator: a robotic, tentacled, female-ish
thingie strikingly similar to Alice Krige’s Borg Queen, in 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact. This
Transformer version is equally nasty, because she zaps Optimus Prime and makes
him evil.
Because ... well, just because.
Because it gives Bay an excuse for even more gratuitous destruction, when the
“bad” Optimus Prime faces off against the remaining Autobots, most notably
Cade’s boon companion, the forever loyal Bumblebee (Erik Aadahl).
Optimus Prime thus travels to
Earth to wreak havoc, closely followed by the Transformer
Creator-Queen-thingie. She drags along the
entire planet-size Cybertron, which — displaying a stunning ignorance of
celestial physics — destroys Earth’s Moon before more or less colliding with
our world, which somehow doesn’t knock us out of orbit, or wreck our
atmosphere, or damage more than what is located at the actual contact point.
But that’s the third act. Most viewers will have
abandoned trying to wrest logic from any of this, hours earlier.
Bay obviously adores his four
most frequent directorial tics, and clearly expects us to admire them with
equal sycophantic fawning:
A) The aforementioned extreme
close-ups;
B) Extended sequences of
Transformers pounding each other, metal bits spraying in all directions, with
trees, buildings and people galore pulverized, often in slow motion;
C) Our stars sliding, dangerously
fast, down the sides of tall buildings, or upended landscapes, or chunks of
Cybertron (once the good guys “invade” it); and
D) Montages of Transformers doing
what they do best: jumping into the air, flipping about and morphing into
trucks and muscle cars, which then roar down the highway. Particularly the
roaring down the highway part. One assumes that Bay never matured out of the
little boy who wanted to tinker with his daddy’s vintage Mustang.
Indeed, you could build the
entire film from a specific sequence of these four items ... and that’s
precisely what Bay has done. To wit:
Decepticons roar into the frame;
insert A) nervous close-up. Then B) Decepticons and Autobots beat the crap out
of each other. Cade, Vivian and/or others always seem to be standing on top of
something tall that gets destroyed, whereupon C) they slip and slide,
full-tilt, toward Certain Death below, only to be rescued, at the last possible
second, by some Autobot. At which point, our human protagonists are scooped up
by the Autobots, which D) morph into their vehicular selves, and speed down the
road to safety.
If one or more Autobots has been
hurt or destroyed during the skirmish, add A) tearful close-up.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Again. And
again. Andagainandagainandagain.
I want my 149 minutes back.
Better still, I want Michael Bay locked up, his director’s staff pried from his
incompetent, hack fingers, and a monitoring bracelet locked onto one wrist, to
prevent him from ever helming another film.
Because he is, by far,
Hollywood’s worst offender when it comes to transforming film’s artistic potential
into deplorable, infantile garbage.
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