Earlier this year, Guy Ritchie hinted that Hollywood that a blockbuster adaptation of King Arthur will never work. A month later, Michael Bay takes the extra step and loads an already-disproven concept with explosions and giant robots. Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth entry in the overgrown Transformers franchise.
Let’s start with how this is a great movie: it’s the last time that Michael Bay is helming a Transformers movie as director.
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Yup. That’s about it. Let’s move on to the bad and the terrible.
This movie is directed by Michael Bay. If you’ve seen even one of his previous movies, you know what you’re getting. That being said, Transformers 5 is terrible, even by his standards. The meaningless explosion extravaganza series quickly lost its appeal after the first one. We’re in the fifth now. The fact that the series hasn’t grown one bit is downright disappointing even if you weren’t expecting anything.
If you’ve watched the movie’s promotional material, you were probably expecting a Transformers flick with a unique historical twist and where their primary adversary is an evil Optimus Prime. If you didn’t watch them, you were expecting the usual mind-numbing fun from a Transformers movie. What we actually got was the mind-numbing fun but with disproportionate subplots, snarky sarcasm, and overused character tropes.
If anything, Transformers 5 had the promise of reinvention. There’s a new logo, an interesting arc with an evil Prime, and Izabella who shows a lot of promise. It certainly piqued my curiosity. Sadly, the most promising parts each took approximately ten minutes in a movie with a two-hours-and-a-half runtime. The first act was a bright spot because of Izabella (Isabela Moner) but they hurriedly spirited her away from any spotlight before the tumultuous second and third acts started. Likewise, the advertised battle between Optimus Prime and Bumblebee lasted all of about five minutes and ended in a Batman v Superman fashion.
The second act was pure story exposition carried by the bravado of the great Anthony Hopkins who plays Sir Edmund Burton, an expert on Transformers history. Hopkins had fun with his role. He was a bright spot amidst Mark Wahlberg’s generic-white-man-hero and Laura Haddock’s generic-hot-girl-sidekick shtick. Like Izabella though, Burton was done away with in pitiful fashion. Cade Yeager (Wahlberg) and Viviane Wembley (Haddock) were woefully unprepared to carry the movie. If they weren’t caught up in the action, they were in each other’s pants with cringeworthy sex jokes.
Besides them, every other character in the movie was the same generic everyman with tired snide remarks in every scene repeated over and over and over and over again. Seriously, why does everyone in the movie have to be so snarky and sarcastic? Every piece of dialogue ends with a one-liner and it’s terrible. It’s crappy writing.
The movie’s third act was your standard Michael Bay fare of epic action scenes, CGI explosions, and shake-in-your-seat bass. To be fair, I didn’t mind the mind-numbing had it not come after already mind-numbing second act. There’s not much to comment on this act. It’s the same thing you’ll see in every Bay movie. By then, I was already internally screaming for the movie to end. Mind-numbing is not an exaggerated adjective for Transformers 5.
Transformers: The Last Knight is a terrible movie. Quite frankly, it’s insulting to a moviegoer’s intellect. But going into a Michael Bay movie, what else can we expect? If you braved through the movie, congratulations. If not, you’re not missing anything.
