Transformers: Age of Extinction (*½)
Directed
by: Michael Bay
Starring:
Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Sophia
Myles, Li Bingbing, T.J. Miller, Titus Welliver
Starring the voices of: Peter Cullen, Mark Ryan, John Goodman, John DiMaggio, Ken Watanabe
Seen:
July 7th 2014
*½
Out of ****
Monumentally
stupid and excessively loud, the Transformers movies are getting worse and
worse as the sequels stack up. Not even relatively entertaining performances
from Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci can save this instalment from its painfully
dumb dialogue and extremely convoluted script. For a movie that looks this good
surprisingly little care is taken in producing something resembling an engaging
story. Great visual effects alone do not make a movie, and amid all the carnage
and explosions I was bored halfway through this already too long movie (and at
165 minutes it was too long by about an hour).
The
movie starts with a bit of Transformers history as the creators of the Autobots
detonate “Seeds” on earth, wiping out dinosaurs and creating fields upon fields
of Transformium (yes – that’s what they call the metal the Transformers are
made of, Transformium…). Four years after events as they transpired in the
previous movie, the Autobots are in hiding. They are, together with a large covert
government group, all looking for Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots,
who disappeared after the Chicago battle.
Cade
Yeager (Wahlberg) and his daughter Tessa (Peltz) grind out a life for
themselves, Cade trying to earn enough through scavenging and inventing to get
Tessa through college. When Cade and his partner/employee Lucas (Miller) get a
job restoring a cinema, they discover an old truck in the building. Cade takes
it home and realises he has happened upon a Transformer, Optimus Prime (Cullen).
Shady government agents led by the bullish James Savoy (Welliver) show up and
threaten Cade and Tessa in efforts to unearth Optimus and Optimus reveals
himself, setting in motion a large-scale hunt when he manages to get away with
Cade, Tessa, and Shane (Reynor), Tessa’s Irish, rally-driver boyfriend.
Savoy’s
boss, Harold Attinger (Grammer), is understandably upset with Optimus escaping,
and he approaches his business partner Joshua Joyce (Tucci), for further
assistance. Joyce has “discovered” Transformium, and is building his own
Transformers with information gleaned from leftover Transformer technology
scrounged after the Chicago battle. It all barrels down to a massive
confrontation between the Autobots and the newly created bots and the
Government agents and their “neutral” ally bots with their own plans; and
Optimus gets some additional reinforcements in to aid in the battle to save
earth from extinction…
Visually
the movie is a definite improvement on previous Transformers movies, as you can
now actually figure out what it is that you’re looking at in action sequences. The
story is surprisingly full of plot twists, but yet it still manages to be
nothing more than empty setups for the next big action set-piece. A fish
shouldn’t be judged by its ability to climb a tree, and by the same measure a
Transformers movie shouldn’t be judged as an art-house movie. Judging it as a
Transformers movie it still falls heavily on its face however, as the possibly
intentionally cheesy dialogue is mind numbingly flat, and for an action movie
it gets surprisingly boring. An action movie needs a good story punctuated by occasional
good action set-pieces, not minimal story barely holding together scenes of constant
synapse-singing that we are subjected to here. Transformers: Age of Extinction
is just another money-grabber (yes, it grabbed my money too…) from a director so
far past his prime (yet still being given massive budgets to play with) that he
wouldn’t know a good plot if it bit his arm off – which is something I felt
like doing, just so I could beat the writers of this movie with my own severed
arm.
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