With each successive Transformers film making even more than the last with the films now making in excess of $1billion the relentless march of metal continues apace with this latest entry apparently being the last to be directed by Michael Bay bringing his usual brand of Bayhem to the proceedings but what’s different here is the levity because its chock full of quips and asides and almost seems to be laughing at itself.
Starting in a Arthurian England in almost Monty Python style with Stanley Tucci as a drunken Merlin cantering around on his horse and engaging with one of the Transformers who gives him a magic stick of destiny or some such gubbins which gives King Arthur a victory in battle. Yes, because like the fourth film where we had robo dinosaurs this latest film plunders the Arthurian legend before fasting forwarding 1600 years and the plot hops about all over the world (USA, UK, Havana, Namibia, Jordan) taking in a load of different characters including a bunch of kids, Anthony Hopkins, John Turturro, and of course Mark Wahlberg which is where the plot eventually settles with as he is pursued by a bunch of government soldiers. Wahlberg is eventually summoned to Sir Edmund Burton and his English castle. Hopkins is having a whale of a time playing Sir Edmund and chews up the scenery as much as the Transformers destroy it. It’s at his castle that Wahlberg is teamed up with the highly improbable and stunningly gorgeous Laura Haddock as an Oxford professor (frankly if we’d have had professor like that at Oxford we would have gone to far more lectures) and together their animosity to each other turns toward luuuuurrve as they set about saving the world. Let the carnage commence. Well it does almost from the opening moment and what follows is two and a half hours of relentless CGI metal mangling.
So despite what ever we say this will be a success and Bay and his scriptwriters throw in a load of jokes and though the film can’t resist its usual product placement (Bud Light & Cat have their moments). As usual it’s undoubtedly too long to such a degree that Wahlberg’s hair gets longer in successive scenes and Laura Haddock looks like a younger Angelina Jolie in a black stripper dress which at one point she offers to take off immediately getting the attention of every Dad in the audience.
With its seemingly obligatory almost incoherent story which includes such choice lines as, ’I don’t gotta home!” and that old favourite, ‘This isn’t happening!’ regrettably though it is and for fans of the franchise it’s more of the same. We look forward to Michael Bay doing a Jane Austen film adaptation.
Here’s the trailer…….
