Why I Saw It: Dark of the Moon was enough of an improvement to give me hope for this one.
Cast: Has anyone involved in this actually seen one of the movies that user Mark Wahlberg right? He can be tough and he can be funny Bays' own Pain & Gain last year proved that. Here, he's sort of a whiny dad who can turn on Rambo-mode on a dime. He could've been an upgrade over Shia. As he's used here, he wasn't. Nicola Peltz as a stand-in Megan Fox is ok. Her character is an amalgamation of all children from movies with a single parent. Jack Reynor is the most generic "young stud" I've seen in a very long time. Kelsey Grammer chews scenery with the best of them. Stanley Tucci immediately feels comfortable in this world. I think that's a compliment. It's nice to see TJ Miller show up for some comedic relief. There was also more of an attempt than I remember before to make characters out of the Transformers, so there's a fat Transformer (not sure why any Transformer would be fat), a tough guy Transformer, and a Samurai Transformer (I'm not sure why any transformer would have an ethnicity) to go along with Optimus and Bumblebee. I'm convinced by now that in live-action, these movies only work from the human perspective. Giving the Transformers too much personality makes everything much less, well, plausible is the wrong word, but you know what I mean.
Plot: Wahlberg plays a bankrupt engineer who has a workshop akin to a grown up Goonies hang-out. He goes to pick an old movie theater of its valuables and finds a truck. No one seems to think much of why there's a truck in there, but whatever. He brings it back to his workshop and discovers that it's Optimus Prime. Then there's about 3 climactic battles in different places, including Chicago, which is looking pretty good for a city they describe as devastated only five years before by the events in the third movie. I don't know. This plot makes very little sense. This movie goes on forever. It is a hair under 3 hours! The older I get and the more movies I see, I realize that only good movies can fill that much time without it being excruciating. At the 1 hour 40 minute mark I was hoping the big battle happening was the climax. Over an hour later, it finally ends. I have no idea why. The plot makes almost no sense.
Elephant in the Room: Is bigger better? This is the fourth movie in the franchise which began in 2007. I love that first movie. The second movie is a mess and was a cursed production, what with the writer's strike, Shia's injury, and Megan Fox feuding with Michael Bay, so I simply ignore that one. The third movie effectively escalates everything. By now, there's nothing left, so the strategy was to have as much robot battling as possible. That sounds great except that there was so much noise to every fight scene. I often couldn't tell who was fighting or what was going on. There was often fighting going on where I didn't even know the stakes.
To Sum Things Up:
I can forgive a movie for having a ridiculous or impenetrable plot as long as the action is well done. I've defended The Matrix Reloaded for that exact reason. When a movie introduces paper-thin characters, blows things up rather than stage anything, and doesn't even make me laugh, I have nothing to stick to in its defense. I'm not someone looking to dislike Age of Extinction. Even if it was ok I'd call it good. This was terrible. I have no other way to say it. Michael Bay is now sleepwalking through these things. Someone else needs to step in and try something new because we've gone as far as we can with this iteration.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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