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Transformers: The Last Knight
STARRING: Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Hopkins
DIRECTOR: Michael Bay
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: PG-15
RUNNING TIME: 149 minutes
There are many travesties in modern filmmaking. Remakes of classic films that don’t need to exist. Stanley Kubrick never winning an Oscar. Batman vs Superman. Adam Sandler still getting cast.
But none are more grating than the Transformers series consistently being ranked as one of the highest-grossing box office franchises. The latest appalling iteration, The Last Knight, may just be the worst yet, which is actually the most impressive thing about it.
We aren’t even graced with the mercy of a short run-time, minimising our pain with the relief of a swift exit from the cinema and a cold shower when we get home. A film primarily about good robots fighting naughty robots has no business being two-and-a-half hours long. Worse, Transformers: The Last Knight is so convoluted and drawn-out that it feels like double that amount of time has passed.
Just like the rest of the series, Michael Bay’s fifth Transformers film sees the Autobots (good) fight the Decepticons (naughty) for little more reason than that’s simply what they do. And, just like the rest, it tries to crowbar Transformers lore into human history and legends, almost to the point where it seems like Earth belongs more to these big old cars with faces than to us.
This time around it’s King Arthur and the Crusades, where we see that Merlin (played by a particularly silly Stanley Tucci) was given a magic staff by a Transformer, and that staff is now the key to saving the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because that same idea is literally what happens in almost every single Transformers movie to date. In the first film it was a dusty pair of glasses that held the key to saving Cybertron and now it’s a big stick. It was a flimsy excuse for a plot then, and it’s tired and flimsy now.
Mark Wahlberg is back as Cade Yeager and spends the entire film looking totally confused by every situation he’s presented with. He’s helped by Laura Haddock’s Oxford University professor Vivian Wembley, who exists to point out logical solutions in a much less prettier (although I guess more believable) guise than Megan Fox.
One of the sillier highlights is Anthony Hopkins babbling on about robots as historian and astronomer Sir Edmund Burton. Hearing an Oscar-winning actor and actual British Knight talking in-depth Autobot lore was genuinely quite funny, whether intentional or not.
Wahlberg and his friends end up embroiled in the plot to find Merlin’s staff and ... do a thing to help the Autobots restore Cybertron to its former glory. This time they’re not only up against the Decepticons though as Bay has added another group of antagonists into the mix in the form of the government-led Transformers Reaction Force (TRF). These mercenaries are tasked with ridding the world of all Transformers but serve as slight bumps in the road of Wahlberg and company’s stick-finding mission.
Similarly, Optimus Prime’s turn to the dark side that has been teased in multiple trailers plays out as hackneyed and as pointless as turncoat plots have always done.
One of the main issues with the characters in The Last Knight is that they don’t just act the way they’re feeling, they announce almost every single mood they have out loud despite it being blatantly obvious. So when Tucci shows up three sheets to the wind, it’s not enough that he’s swerving from side-to-side on his horse, but he literally exclaims: “I’m sozzled!” as if it wasn’t glaringly apparent.
It’s as though Bay doesn’t trust his audience enough to let them work out even the most obvious things for themselves - ironic given the film’s obscene length.
There’s also no end of befuddling bots. Some have got celebrity voices, but the action moves at such an intense pace that it’s hard to distinguish bot from bot, good from naughty. This is particularly true of newcomer Canopy, who looks almost exactly like series regular Bumblebee except for a dirty pile of bricks stuck to his back. Add the similarities between the Transformers to an already convoluted plot, and the whole thing ends up jumping around like a massive, shiny mess.
Where Bay does impress though is his massive set pieces involving the humans. It’s a running joke that in a Bay film, everything explodes whether plausible by the laws of physics or not, so at least you can prepare yourself for some headache-inducing ‘booms’.
The one actually exciting action sequence in the film involves Wahlberg running up a fallen space station which is being attacked not only by Decepticons but by giant tidal waves too. This occurs way too far into the film though, after you’ve spent more than two hours following these characters around the globe. The same goes for the much-teased fight between Bumblebee and Optimus Prime and what should have been an iconic showdown just leaves you hoping for a quick resolution between these warring friends.
Michael Bay has now been making Transformers films for more than 10 years. In that time, the series has moved on very little and The Last Knight is the loudest and most explosively dull instalment yet. A recycled plot told through an overly on-the-nose script, read by a confusing parade of characters, and muddled action scenes does nothing to justify its epic length.
Like mullets, Transformers should have stayed in the Eighties. Please, let it die.
Showing at: Cineco, Seef I, Seef II, Saar, Wadi Al Sail, Mukta A2, Novo Cinemas
