Enough is enough . . .
Transformers: The Last Knight (12A)
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Anthony Hopkins
Director: Michael Bay
The Plot: I hope you're ready for this. So, in yet another example of the Transformers having already been on Earth, a group of them arrived during the dark ages and allied themselves with Arthur and the Knights of the Round. They brought with them a relic that has the power to reanimate Cybertron, which takes the form of a staff that's presented to Merlin and coded to his DNA so that only his descendants can wield it. The Knights withdraw, leaving the prediction that one day someone will use the staff to stop a great evil. They leave behind one Knight with a talisman, to search for the person who will become the "Last Knight" and lead them to victory, whilst a group of humans calling themselves the Wicwiccans devote their lives to protecting the staff and keeping the knowledge of Transformers and Merlin's descendants hidden.
And breathe. We're only halfway through.
Fast-forward to the present, five years after the events of Age of Extinction. All Transformers are now illegal and hunted by a worldwide organisation called the TRF, so Cade Yeager (Wahlberg) now lives off the grid and shelters the Autobots. He encounters the old Knight and the talisman latches onto him, which not only marks him as the hero of legend but also somehow makes everyone - the TRF and Megatron included - suddenly aware of the entire backstory and determined to retrieve the staff. Yeager is summoned to England by Sir Edmund Burton (Hopkins), a member of the Wicwiccans, who also summons Vivian Wembley (Haddock), a historian who also happens to be the last surviving descendant of Merlin. Burton sends them on a quest to retrieve the staff from the hidden refuge of the old Knights, but time is running out as not only are the TRF and Decepticons pursuing them, but Cyberton itself is headed to Earth, bringing with it the "Creator" called Quintessa (who was responsible for all the shenanigans in the last film), the powerful being responsible for the creation of the Transformers, who wants to use the staff to restore Cyberton and destroy Earth in the process, and has also brainwashed Optimus Prime (who, you know, went there to try and kill her at the end of the last film) into helping her. Oh, and did I mention that Earth itself might also somehow be Unicron?
And that's not even all of it.
Review: Oh dear. I really didn't think that there could be a worse Transformers film than its predecessor Age of Extinction, but oh how wrong I was. This is a colossal clusterfuck of a film, a bloated, two-and-a-half-hour session of Michael Bay wanking himself to completion over and over whilst steamrolling over anything resembling plot cohesion, continuity or artistic integrity.
It's difficult to know where to start, and in all honesty it's probably unfair to place all of the blame on Bay for this. About 90% of the film's problems can be traced back to the script, but in the end that's the script that he was happy to shoot. And holy fuck it's awful. I can't remember any other film that has a plot so complicated and yet handled so badly as this one. Plot threads are dangled in front of us and then thrown away. Stuff happens that contradicts not only events that happened in previous films, but also things that have happened five or ten minutes prior. There are plot gaps from Age of Extinction that aren't explained. And despite the fact that a great deal of time is spent by characters spouting exposition at us, by the end of the film I still didn't have a fucking clue what was going on. Josh Duhamel, who you may remember from the previous films in the series as the likeable soldier who worked with and supported the Autobots, is reduced in this film to telling us what's going on with such gems as "Look, it's a big alien ship." Yes, that's the level of dialogue in this film. At one point in the third act, a small Transformer resembling Dusty Bin and owned by Izabella (a surrogate daughter of sorts to Yeager, from another plotline not handled well or resolved in any way) is released onto the battlefield. It trundles up to a Deception gun emplacement, aims it's weapon and speaks it's only line of dialogue in the entire film: "Fuck you."
There is just too much going on here for any reasonable audience to deal with or make sense of, because of the way it's handled. How does Megatron know about the staff and why does he want to help Quintessa destroy Earth? Who knows. Why is Duhamel's character working undercover in the TRF? Who knows. Why is Grimlock the only Dinobot left, and why does Yeager instead suddenly have three "baby" dinobots as well? Who knows. And why are some Autobots playing fucking volleyball in Cuba and never come to help? Who knows. We're never told!
I'll stop for a moment to address a concern I'm sure you all have - do things blow up in this film? Yes, a lot. There are more explosions and slow-motion robot destruction than you can shake a proverbial stick at. To his credit it's one thing Bay does have an eye for, as for all the criticism I can level at this film it's the one part that you expect from a Transformers film that he gets right. The action is second-to-none, and there are even moments of cinematography (not in the battles) that verge on the spectacular, but the sheer volume of explosions and robot smack-down overwhelm an already hard-to-follow story.
Now, the acting. Oh, the acting. You might say that it's the saving grace of the film, as it's really the only reason I could recommend you to go and watch it. I haven't laughed or shook my head as much as this when watching a film for some time. Again, the script has a large part to play in this, as actors can only do so much with what they're given, but the dialogue and character development (if there's any at all) is terrible to the point of hilarity. Wahlberg is simply Wahlberg in this film, making no attempt at either a Texan accent or a dramatic performance. At one point I seriously expected him to tell another character to say hello to their mother for him. Oh, and do you remember that I told you that Yeager is given a talisman that marks him out as "the Last Knight"? Well, by the end of the film this has absolutely zero relevance whatsoever. At one point it allows him to summon a sword and fight one of the transformer Knights, but in the climactic final battle where it might actually be useful it's nowhere to be seen, which is mind-boggling given the sub-title of the film. Laura Haddock (who you might remember being wonderful in her very brief scenes as Star-Lord's dying mother in the Guardians of the Galaxy films) is given a walking stereotype to play here. Her character has zero romantic chemistry with Yeager and most of their "banter" is funny for completely the wrong reasons. She is, unfortunately, this film's character who just seems to be there to look good in tight clothes (which the series has a habit of, just look back at Megan Fox and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), which is a real shame. Other characters are similarly under-used and stereotypical. And the less said about Cogsworth, the transformer butler of Hopkins' character, the better. Cogsworth is the Jar Jar Binks of Transformers: The Last Knight.
I need to spend a moment here talking about Anthony Hopkins, who is a fucking lunatic in this film. I don't know what he was smoking, but it feels like he approached Bay and said "All right Michael, I'm going to play this character as batshit crazy as I possibly can, how does that sound?" to which Bay responded "Okay Anthony, sounds great." His character, an eccentric English lord, fluctuates between the cool. thespian tones you'd expect to moments of outright lunacy, where Hopkins doesn't just chew the scenery but takes huge, gnashing bites out of it. "That is a bitchin' car" he remarks as Hot Rod comes roaring up the driveway of his castle in the form of a Lamborghini (an Italian car, despite Hot Rod being so French in this film that it wouldn't have been surprising if he put on a beret and started twirling a baguette around). At one point I was literally in tears laughing as he chases children out of a submarine (a disguised Transformer, of course) yelling "Run fat boy!" His dialogue and performance in this film really is something to behold.
Perhaps the saddest part of this film and all it's flaws is Optimus Prime. Our hero character, and if you would believe all the marketing, now our main villain and cause of the greatest conflict in the story as the Autobots now have to fight their leader. He's hardly in it. I'd say Prime gets about ten minutes of screen time, tops. "I am Nemesis Prime" he snarls angrily after being brainwashed, a title never spoken again by him or any other character in the film. When he does finally make his entrance and fights Bumblebee, we're given our "Martha" moment of 2017 when, on hearing Bumblebee's actual voice, Prime instantly snaps out of his conditioning and rejoins the Autobots. That's it. That's how that entire plot thread is handled and resolved. It could have been the driving force of the film, but as it is, it's little more than a footnote.
There's so much more that I could say, but I think I've gone on long enough.
Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
A disastrous and embarrassing low for the Transformers franchise, this is an absolutely atrocious film where the only saving grace is the unintended hilarity of the acting performances. It's worth watching just to witness Anthony Hopkins go completely insane, but that's it. This won't be the end of the series, as it continues to make too much money for that (a standalone Bumblebee film and the sixth main film in the series are both planned), but this is officially the script that killed it.
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