Despite being the right age, I was never into Transformers as
a kid, so as an adult, I haven’t had much of an interest in the film series,
and thus haven’t seen any of them. I can’t speak to whether “Transformers: The
Last Knight,” the fifth installment of the massively lucrative global
franchise, is any better or worse than the previous movies. But I do know that
the guiding idea behind the series appears to be: “What if we took a beloved
property about how neat it would be to make friends with a race of alien robots
who can turn into cars you can ride in, and made it absolutely no fun
whatsoever?”
Mark
Wahlberg returns to the series as the impeccably named Cade Yeager, inventor
and unofficial protector of the Autobots. In order to
save humanity, Cade teams up with Izabella (Isabela Moner),
a spunky orphan he insists on calling “bro,” and Dr. Vivian Wembley
(Laura Haddock), an Oxford professor-slash-supermodel, to use a medieval
talisman to find an ancient staff that will help prevent the Transformers’ home
planet of Cybertron from crashing into Earth. Or
something. Also there’s a connection to Arthurian legend.
Sitting
through “The Last Knight” is like listening to a 5-year-old on a sugar high
describe a dream they had … while they pummel you with the entire contents of
their toy box. The plot is so indecipherable, I can only describe it in the
style of Bill Hader’s club kid SNL character, Stefon.
This movie
has everything: three-headed robot dragons; Mark Wahlberg quoting Arthur C.
Clarke; malevolent assassin pocket watches; Nazi flashbacks; secret messages hidden
in children’s pop-up books; drunk Merlin; interstellar space goddesses; Stonehenge;
Sir Anthony Hopkins as the keeper of the secret history of Transformers; and a
psychopathic metal butler named Cogman.
I know
listing everything this way makes watching the movie sound like a blast, but in
practice, even half-heartedly keeping track of it all is exhausting. At some
point during the endless climactic battle, I realized that a young boy was
singing the ABCs at the top of his lungs in the middle of the theater. Normally
that might have proven annoying, but here it provided a much-needed tether,
pulling me back to reality when time and space had started to lose all meaning.
So I thank you, child.
I definitely
saved myself a lot of headache by not having any previous point of reference
for the nonsensical story; whenever something didn’t make sense, I chalked it
up to being something established in a previous film (although based on
conversations after the fact, it seems that’s hardly ever the case).
There’s no
need for a movie about giant robots smashing things to be this complicated. But
there’s so much weirdness crammed into the margins (for example: a throwaway
line tells us the Transformers aided Harriet Tubman with the Underground
Railroad), that it becomes kind of compelling. There’s something to be said for
Michael Bay’s determination to deliver pure kinetic chaos and spectacle straight
into his audience’s eyes, and if you surrender to its gonzo energy, it’s hard
not to get caught up in it, at least a little. Just remember to bring some
aspirin.
Check back on Friday for additional film coverage, including a review of Edgar Wright’s
“Baby Driver.”
This article appears in Jun 28 – Jul 4, 2017.
