![]() ![]() And robots come and go with such little concern for backstory or context that it feels like every scene was constructed simply by throwing a dart at a roster of potential characters. Optimus doles out platitudes ("Honor to the end!") at seemingly random intervals. Wahlberg plays Cade with comic, wide-eyed goofiness in one moment, only to be deadly serious the next. Characters mysteriously change location in the space of a cut during action sequences. The story has so many strange shifts and awkward lurches that it’s hard to believe it was ever intended to be a cohesive whole - and that feeling permeates every aspect of the film from start to finish. Cade and company discover that a mercurial tech executive (Stanley Tucci, the film’s one consistent highlight) has found a way to build Autobot clones using a rare element called "transformium." Tucci sics his clones on our heroes, because the aforementioned robot bounty hunter wants Optimus Prime so badly that he’s willing to give Tucci a device that will create even more transformium in return.Īnd yes, it’s really called transformium. They team up with the few remaining Autobots, with Grammer’s CIA hit squad in pursuit. What follows is such a mess of random events and happenstance that it’s best described in snippets rather than pretending it builds any sort of meaningful narrative: Cade repairs the truck and finds out that it’s Optimus Prime. One day he’s picking up scraps from an abandoned movie theater, where he comes across a broken-down semi truck. Cade is an inventor, mainly because he wears glasses and keeps reminding everyone that he’s an inventor, but he’s forced to make ends meet by repairing junk that he salvages. Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager, a single dad trying to keep his home out of foreclosure and provide for his 17-year-old daughter, Tessa ( Bates Motel’s Nicola Peltz). Perhaps he’s lying because he’s working with a robot bounty hunter named Lockdown, who is never set up or explained in any meaningful way - but his face does turn into a pretty cool-looking gun. A CIA agent (Kelsey Grammer, talking very deliberately and never blinking) is making a name for himself by hunting down the Autobots and killing them one by one - only he’s telling the president that he’s actually killing Decepticons. The Chicago battle has convinced humanity that all Transformers are bad, and the Autobots have gone into hiding (Optimus was nearly killed at some point, apparently, and hasn’t been seen since). In case you don’t remember, that movie ended with the Autobots victorious in a battle that laid waste to much of Chicago, Optimus Prime intoning that he would always protect Earth and its inhabitants. As the lights went down in the theater, I thought that this might be the Transformers film to break the cycle, upending all expectations by actually being good.Īge of Extinction picks up several years after the last entry, 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. ![]() And there's Bay himself, who recently stretched outside his comfort zone with Pain & Gain. There's the introduction of the Dinobots, creatures so bizarre that they seem uniquely suited to the director’s larger-than-life sensibilities. There's Mark Wahlberg, injecting new blood and a new dynamic into the mix. But with Transformers: Age of Extinction, it's felt like that could be changing. (Well, Pearl Harbor happened first, but Bad Boys 2 was a delightfully insane course correction.) With giant robots taking center stage, the Hasbro toy adaptations have lacked any semblance of coherent story or characters, leaving audiences with little to hold on to beyond the visuals - save for the gut-level disdain many felt for Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox. In many ways, he was the second coming of Tony Scott, reinventing the action movie for a generation that wanted bigger, louder, faster, more.Īnd then Transformers happened. Action flicks like The Rock, Bad Boys, and Armageddon were never seen as capital-c Cinema, but they were incredibly entertaining and bombastic summer rides, packed with an attention to visual detail and style that were uniquely the director’s own. There was a time - and it really wasn’t that long ago - when you could say that Michael Bay made good movies with a straight face. ![]()
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