‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ Review: Michael Bay’s Latest Hot Mess Is Only Slightly Less Messy
The Last Knight, the fifth of Michael Bay’s clang-clang-clang-went-the-robot adventures, but fear not, fans of the franchise: if you’re here for the director’s trademark chaos editing (where fights go from points A to D to Q), toxic masculinity (and female objectification), comedy scenes rendered tragic (and vice versa), and general full-volume confusion, you’ll get all those things in abundance.
[...] the film plays like a greatest-hits collection of the worst films so far of Summer 2017, from an appearance by the Knights of the Round Table that calls to mind King Arthur:
Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) has returned to the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron to tell his creator to quit trying to destroy Earth, but instead he’s hypnotized by the jellyfish-like Quintessa (Gemma Chan), turned into Nemesis Prime, and sent back to get that staff so that Quintessa can drain Earth of its energy and restore Cybertron to its former glory.
Bay loves fawning, recruitment-ad-ready shots of our fighting forces and their machinery of war, but he’s not above showing the military making really stupid decisions and then later deferring to civilians mid-battle.
The aforementioned coherent scenes are exciting to watch — there’s an entertaining segment early on where a seemingly blown-apart robot uses its various limbs to separately fight a band of enemies — but by the end of the movie, we’re treated to yet another assaultive Michael Bay finale, where everything is fighting everything else as visual reality collapses and the soundtrack (by Steve Jablonsky, “Deepwater Horizon”) just booms and booms and booms.
Wahlberg continues to show an affinity for roles that allow him to be both the only person who can save the day and the only person who’s right about everything, but that’s as much as he gets from screenwriters Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan, who continue the “Transformers” tradition of treating character, plot and pacing as quaint, old-fashioned niceties that get glancing notice, if any.
In film like “I Heart Huckabees,” Wahlberg has a light comic touch, but a supposedly funny scene in which he returns to his junkyard home to yell at a bunch of obnoxious robots is going on his Razzies Life Achievement reel next to clips from “The Happening” and “Max Payne.”
Hopkins gets one or two scenes where he’s actually enjoying himself and not just mentally calculating whether this paycheck can get him a walk-in humidor to go with the new wine cellar, and poor Haddock, as the female lead, is stuck contending with being a multi-degreed academic who nonetheless has an affinity for oxygen-depleting skirts and push-up bras, all captured in full effect by cinematographer Jonathan Sela (“John Wick”).