Transformers: The Last Knight — movie review; What’s the point anymore?
What a mess.
Transformers: The Last Knight takes place an unspecified amount of time after Transformers: Age of Extinction, likely months, and we see Optimus Prime frozen, floating around in space struggling in his search for his Maker. Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) is our narrator and the character that takes us on the journey throughout the history of the Transformers — turns out they’ve been here the whole time we have, even getting involved in WWII. Apparently Bumblebee helped defeat the Nazi’s, so yeah.
Oh, I almost forgot, the story focuses around Merlin’s sword, the sword (maybe it’s a staff) was given to him by Transformers and allows him to control older Transformers that can combine into a dragon? I think?
Merlin is played by Stanley Tucci who was in the previous film as a completely different character…
This iteration of Merlin is a drunk who promises to give up all of his bad ways for the Transformers help. But not the women, he could never give up the women.
One of Cade Yeager’s (Mark Wahlberg) first lines in this film is to threaten a 13 year old boy saying, “have you ever been punched in the face really hard?”. It’s absolutely hilarious, not in a good way, and it’s also one of the only lines I remember from the film.
Honestly, there are about three or four different plot points that are merged together in this film, all are so incoherent and so pointless. We see whatshisface (John Turturro) pop up numerous times, but I really can’t understand why, something about getting Burton to induct him into something. I dunno, but he’s there on the phone from Cuba a lot with one of the Autobots from Dark of the Moon.
How I feel about the previous Transformers films goes as follows:
Transformers (2007)— Great, one of my favourite films ever.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)— Meh, but enough robot action to make me happy enough watching it again.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) — Good, bit too much whiny human stuff, though.
Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) — Bad, waaay too much human nonsense.
I was willing to give The Last Knight the benefit of the doubt, I really hoped people were over reacting, I thought there’d be at least enough robot fighting with Optimus being bad to make this film cool.
But really, what’s the point any more.
This isn’t a Transformers film, at all. They’re background characters who have a combined 3 minutes of screen time.
I was going to try not to get too spoiler-y, but who cares? So, spoilers ahead.
The Optimus — Bumblebee fight (you know, the biggest selling point of this movie) lasted 30 seconds, and ends when Bumblebee talks, causing Optimus to get all nostalgic and become good again. Despite the fact that earlier in the film we see Yeager and Izabella (Isabella Moner) try, and fail, to fix Bumblebees voice-box. Also, Bumblebee can magically put himself back together and that is never explained.
There is an Optimus — Megatron fight that lasts 10 seconds at most. Hot Rod looks cool, and has a cool weapon that he annoyingly advertises every time (“I stop zee time”), but he’s barely in the film. Drift and Crosshairs are two interesting characters, they team up to take down a Deceptacon which looks good, but that’s it for the rest of the film.
But the most annoying part, by far, is linked almost directly to the Transformers getting next to no screen time.
Ok, this is the biggest spoiler I could possibly give…….
…… Cade Yeager is The Last Knight.
Yup. I’m a little bit annoyed at myself for not expecting that, but really, it’s a human character and it all makes so little sense. In a way Sam Witwicky was basically The Last Knight in the first three films, so the concept isn’t even a new one within the franchise.
The acting in this film isn’t terrible, especially considering the script they were given to work with;
“You want to know, don’t you duuuuuuuudeeee”
At the end of the day a Transformers film should be fun, with at least 15 minutes of silly robot fights. You should want to watch these films for their action and CGI. The previous films have never been rated terrifically well, but it’s hard to argue they don’t contain these things.
There is no possible chance of giving this film the benefit of the doubt. The plot is stupid, the script is nonsense, there’s no fighting, the hype was unfair and I feel sorry for die-hard fans of the animated series.
I actually spent a good chunk of the film trying to figure out whether I should be offended by the blatant stereotyping of the English. (The answer being no, no one should care what this film says or inferences).
No incentive to re-watch this film is given. Something needs to be changed for the apparent future films that are somehow being green-lit. Even if it’s a terrible film, the least they could do is, you know, actually centre it around the Transformers.
McClue Rating: 32/100
P.S. Cogman is great.
