Review: TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT 
(ACTION/SCI-FI) 
★
Directed by Michael Bay
Screenplay by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway & Ken Nolan
Story by Akiva Goldsman, and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway & Ken Nolan
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Santiago Cabrera, Isabela Moner, Jerrod Carmichael, Stanley Tucci, Liam Garrigan, Martin McCreadie, Rob Witcomb, Marcus Fraser, John Hollingworth, Frank Welker (voice), Peter Cullen (voice), John Goodman (voice), Jim Carter (voice), Gemma Chan (voice)
Rated PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of sci-fi action, language, and some innuendo.
149 minutes
Verdict: It's too long, too stuffed, too lazy, too disinterested, too dumb, and too bad.

12 hours and 41 minutes.  That's how long of all Michael Bay's five Transformers films are combined.  Approximately $967 million.  That's how much they've all cost.  $3.77 billion worldwide.  That's how much they've grossed.  29%.  That's the average percentage of positive critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for the series.  The Transformers series is simply a crushing, depressing and inevitable fact of life that we have to live with today.  Somebody must like them, 'cause they keep making money, but damn.  There's nothing fresh and nothing surprising to be gleaned from the franchise as it currently exists, and TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT merely perpetuates the soulless, numbing drudgery.  It goes on and on and on, and one can only sit there and question the point of anything.  This is two-and-half-hours, and most of it isn't even action.  It's mostly exposition, and nobody cares.  So Transformers have been on Earth throughout history, and they showed up in King Arthur times, and they killed Nazis, and there's some secret society of "Witwiccans" who I guess are the Transformers' best pals, and Earth is secretly another planet with horns, and it's not clear that any of this matters because they're just making it up as they go along.  It's less mean-spirited than the last installment, AGE OF EXTINCTION (no inexplicable lingering on the charred corpse of the comic relief sidekick this time around), and hey, it's 15 minutes shorter, but for the love of God, it's still so effing long.  It's still unclear who this movie is for (I mean, people with money, I guess), between being too violent, crass, profane and lengthy for most children, but at the same time, the characters are increasingly cartoonish and there's even a strange, half-hearted attempt to introduce a child co-lead in the first half of the movie.  This movie has four credited writers, and you've got to wonder if maybe they simply all wrote their own stories with their own characters and then smooshed them all together, because there's so many characters and scenes that are plainly superfluous.

So far, I've actually been able to keep track of these plots fairly well, at least in the moment of watching each of the Transformers movies (REVENGE OF THE FALLEN was a little trickier, but I don't feel like I missed anything), but all the exposition of THE LAST KNIGHT threw me for a loop.  Maybe I'm just getting old.  Anyway, the movie opens interestingly enough in the midst of a colossal, frenetic medieval battle between King Arthur (Liam Garrigan), and his knights, and some nameless enemy.  It's nuts, chaotic and total medieval Bayhem from the moment the movie starts, with a lot of people engulfed in flames.  Apparently, Bay actually wanted to make a King Arthur movie, and frankly, I would rather have watched that.  It might not have been good either, but it would certainly have been more interesting.  Arthur and his knights are on the defensive, awaiting salvation from the wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci, decidedly not playing his character from the previous film, but still giving the best performance of the whole ordeal), who is actually a drunken charlatan but comes to the rescue nonetheless when he makes a deal with, you guessed it, Transformers!  Chilling on Earth in a big spaceship in England, the Knights of Cybertron give Merlin a "magic" staff that gives him and Arthur the power to win the battle.  Flash-forward to the present, and Optimus Prime is in deep space, having left Earth in search of his creator at the end of the last movie, when he arrives on Cybertron and is stunned to see it destroyed (I may be missing something, but wasn't the fact that Cybertron was destroyed the whole reason they were on Earth chasing after the AllSpark cube in the first movie?).  He soon encounters his maker, a metal floating lady named Quintessa (voiced by Gemma Chan) who uses her powers to make part of his face red, turning him into "Nemesis Prime", so he'll help her destroy Earth (which is secretly an ancient Transformer planet called "Unicron", like 'unicorn' with a couple of letters switched around), which is growing horns.  After that, we don't see Prime, Optimus or Nemesis, for most of the movie.  There's about as much of him in this as there was of the Dinobots in the last one.  Meanwhile on Earth, the planet is growing horns.  Transformers are banned and hunted the world over (except in Cuba, where John Turturro makes occasional appearances as his former secret agent conspiracy nut character Seymour Simmons), and an international fighting force called the Tranformers Reaction Force (TRF), including returning character William Lennox (Josh Duhamel, sporting Mr. Fantastic's hair), is murdering the crap out of them.  Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), a Texan inventor with a Boston accent, provides sanctuary for the surviving Autobots in a South Dakota Indian reservation junkyard and goes around the country with Bumblebee rescuing them from the TRF.  During an altercation in an abandoned part of Chicago, (destroyed in the events of the third movie) Cade picks up Izabella (Isabela Moner), an orphaned girl who's been living with Transformers until the TRF came in and murdered the crap out of them.  Cade receives an ancient talisman from a dying Knight of Cybertron who happens to be there, and then they all go back to South Dakota, while the TRF makes a deal with Megatron (voiced by the prolific Frank Welker), you know, the villain from all the other movies?  None of this makes sense, barely any of it is necessary, and then we get a lengthy scene of Megatron dealing with the TRF over which imprisoned Decepticons he can have as part of his team.  The Decepticons and the TRF find the junkyard, but Cade and Izabella escape and are rescued by Cogman (voiced by Jim Carter), a sassy robot butler belonging to Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins, adding this next to M:I-II on the list of unfortunate but probably lucrative jobs).  Basically an exposition machine, Sir Edmund informs them that the talisman that was given to Cade is linked to Merlin's staff and has chosen him to fulfill a quest tied to the destiny of English professor Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), the last descendant of Merlin.

So, that's the "plot."  This is a franchise rooted in the base appeal of watching big robots fighting other big robots, but the best part in this movie is when some knights are fighting some other knights.  There are too many characters when the main characters barely matter as it is, and they're all acting without motivation simply to get to the next set-piece.  Every decision onscreen and behind the camera appears to be rooted in disinterested impulse.  Michael Bay does not make "good" movies, but even while they're all hella too long, he can make movies that are modestly interesting, if only because he wears his limitations and ambitions on his sleeve.  PEARL HARBOR is awful, borderline unwatchable, but it's also a rare look at a filmmaker with his juvenile, uncurious vision attempting to create an Oscar-bait movie with TITANIC-meets-SAVING PRIVATE RYAN as his model.  It sounds snarky, but it really is momentarily fascinating.  He seems to like good movies, and he jumps for the Coen brothers' sloppy seconds at every turn (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman do voices for similar-looking robots in THE LAST KNIGHT, and Goodman's not so bad), but his movies are so dumb, so frenetic, so toxic and so cynical.  There's an interest in his approach, but not a curiosity or personal motivation beyond the will to imitate something that came before.  This is a man who made a really cool action sequence out of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  But with Transformers, we've already seen him do it again and again, and he's on cruise control now.  THE LAST KNIGHT doesn't even have the mean-spiritedness or regressive "humor" of earlier installments of the franchise to shock the viewer into incredulity.  It's just senseless.