Sorry for a late review but this week I'm rolling out the last of my Transformers reviews with a Throwback Thursday Review over Transformers: Age of Extinction and new Transformers: The Last Knight review in the coming days. Other reviews you can expect this week week include a Throwback Thursday Review over Despicable Me 2 and both Baby Driver and Despicable Me 3. The first few weeks of July will incorporate Throwback Thursday Reviews of The Amazing Spider-Man, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Inception, Recollection Reflection Reviews of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and reviews of new releases Spider-Man: Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes, Dunkirk, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
'Transformers: Age of Extinction' Review
Transformers: Age of Extinction takes place five years after Dark of the Moon's Battle of Chicago. The US government has turned against the Autobots, hunting them alongside intergalactic bounty hunter bot Lockdown. Ambitious inventor and overprotective father Cade Yeagar discovers a trashed truck inside an abandoned cinema and brings it home in hopes of repairing the vehicle or scrapping it for parts, only to learn the truck is actually Autobot leader Optimus Prime. Yeagar is then tasked to help Prime reunite the remaining Autobots to protect mankind once more.
Bay allows similar problems to plague this project as incomprehensible action sequences come by the viewer one after the other, sprinkled in the midst of a human storyline you won't be invested in. Watching the Transformers fight one another is cool enough on its own so you don't need to obscure the action with egregious editing and frenetic shaky cam or even draw it out with superfluous slow-motion. For that matter, the Transformers need to be the shining stars of their own franchise. I understand that the effects are expensive but these things are practically guaranteed to be a hit oversees so you may as well pump a little more financial fuel into this gas tank.
Are the effects incredible? Of course, the superb deafening sound design and vibrant visual effects are practically the only redeeming elements of the franchise at this point but none of that really matters if you can't draw audience interest into the onscreen insanity. While I understand the financial motive to extend the Transformers franchise with Age of Extinction, there really isn't a new story to be told with these characters. The end result is that Ehren Kruger's script is a repackaged version of the last three movies (Transformers, Revenge of the Fallen, and Dark of the Moon).
I could go on and on about the story semantics but the film really fails engaging me as a viewer. I consider myself a fairly avid Transformers fan so it shouldn't be that difficult to maintain interest when you have remarkably realized robots fighting one another but this installment nearly bored me to sleep both times I've seen it (when I first caught it on Netflix a year and a half ago and my second viewing for the purposes of this review). Instead, Bay decided that it'd be more worth the audiences' time and money to see Yeagar chastise his underage daughter over her awkward, inappropriate relationship with a twenty year old racer.
Meanwhile, the performances don't offer much to elevate the entertainment. Mark Wahlberg phones it in as Cade Yeagar, providing little personality beyond his thinly sketched characterization of being an overprotective father and the writer's insistence to constantly remind you he's an inventor. Nicola Peltz and Jack Reynor play Tessa Yeagar and Shane Dyson with their bland romance serving as an obnoxious plot thread. Neither actor really shines as a charismatic force to brighten things or draw attention to the monotonous action.
Elsewhere, T.J. Miller, Stanley Tucci, and Bingbing Li playfully factor into the proceedings in varying capacities. Miller's a funny surfer bro, Tucci screams quite a bit as a tech company executive, and Li fights off some henchman with proficiency. They don't do nearly enough to save the movie but provide momentary blips of something off-kilter.
Peter Cullen, John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Robert Foxworth, John DiMaggio, and Reno Wilson all provide sufficient voice work as Optimus Prime, Hound, Drift, Ratchet, Crosshairs, and Brains but none of these actors are really challenging themselves in any way, shape, or form considering they mostly deliver expositional dialogue. For the most part they're voicing caricatures with little personality beyond basic stereotypes.
Frank Welker, Mark Ryan, and Kelsey Grammer fill the antagonistic camp as gruesome Galvatron, the unyielding Lockdown, and wicked government agent Harold Attinger. They make the most of the material provided but are restrained by a paper thin script.
Transformers: Age of Extinction is indicative of everything currently destroying Hollywood, it's essentially a visual effects reel devoid of any sense of purpose other than to make money. Bay or Kruger must know this is true to some extent because there's even a line in the movie about sequels and remakes being prevalent among Hollywood these days. In summary, Age of Extinction is easily the worst Transformers movie I've seen to date simply because it's maddening to even attempt making it through the two hour forty five minute runtime without losing focus. After watching this movie, I knew one simple fact. My mind had been transformed (and not for the better).
