If you make a movie about giant robots fighting each other across a
metropolitan landscape you pretty much have me in your corner from the
get-go, you have to really go out your way to lose me, you’d have to do
something insanely stupid like having the robots being pissed on by a
small dog or worse to have the robots pissing on another person, you’d
need to include racist Stepin Fetchit type robots, and do something
bizarre like give a giant robot truck-nuts. Of course with
Michael Bay
involved these are exactly the kinds of things you’re going to find in
his giant robot movie. He is a man who can take a simple action sequence
and edit so frenetically that it is almost incompressible to an
audience, who thinks the female lead being splayed across a motorbike
like a Maxim cover model is a character moment, and he is the undisputed
king of Military Porn (Michael Bay never met a jet fighter he didn’t
like or at least one he wouldn’t shoot flying by in loving slow motion).
I wasn’t even a big fan of the original cartoon and yet he still
managed to piss me off, but three movies later and a fourth one now in
theaters he’s still raking in butt loads of cash, so what the hell do I
know?
|
“So why again do these robots need human help?” |
This latest installment takes place roughly four years after
Transformers: Dark of the Moon and I’m already excited because
Shia LaBeouf is nowhere to be seen. In his place we have
Mark Wahlberg
as Texan inventor Cade Yeager so don’t get too excited. The story kind
of centers around a Black-Ops division of the C.I.A that has been
hunting the Autobots and killing or capturing them, it is led by Harold
Attinger (
Kelsey Grammer)
who is in league with an evil Transformer bounty Hunter named Lockdown
who wants to bring Optimus Prime to The Creators for some reason. Also
in the mix is Joshua Joyce (
Stanley Tucci)
who plays a billionaire CEO of a “Technology of the Future” type
company and he is in cahoots with Attinger who is supplying him with
Decepticon and Autobot bodies for dissection so he can build his own
Transformers with his supply of “Transformium” that he has had his
people digging up all over the globe. And as if three different villains
weren’t enough we also get the resurrection of Megatron for a pointless
subplot that I guess will pay off in the sequel. Now if any of that
seemed to make sense to you then I’ve done a better job than Michael
Bay.
|
I believe this to be the most accurate reaction to this film. |
Now I’m not sure why one would cast Mark Wahlberg as an inventor, he
couldn’t even pull off convincing high school science teacher in
The Happening, but at least here he is portraying a failed science guy, and he has a sexy daughter Tessa Yeager (
Nicola Peltz) who is seventeen but secretly dating a twenty year old race car driver Shane Dyson (
Jack Reynor)
much to her dad’s chagrin. These three are our main human protagonists
and though none of them reached the annoying levels achieved by Sam
Witwicky in the first three films I still couldn’t give a tinker’s damn
about them. The only human I found at all entertaining was Stanley
Tucci’s billionaire inventor and that is mostly due to the fact that the
character is being played by Stanley Tucci and not by anything in the
script because as written it is a horrible character with an arc that
makes no sense whatsoever. While Kelsey Grammer’s performance as the
evil C.I.A stooge is so phoned in that I wondered if AT&T charged
extra billing.
|
Our heroes? |
This is a Michael Bay film so no one should go in expecting a movie
with nuanced characters inhabiting a tight plot but his level of not
caring about anything but action has reached new levels here, and boy do
you get a lot of action. Action, action, action! I will give him credit
that the editing wasn’t as frenetic as in some of his past films, and
the fight scenes only devolved into annoying shaky-cam a couple of times
but overall you could tell what was going on, you just didn’t care.
Stray Observations:
• Military operations can’t locate or track Optimus Prime who is driving across the flat landscape of Texas.
• Missiles fired by evil Black-Ops soldiers or Evil-Transformers apparently have no targeting ability.
• The three humans are indestructible. The girl actually smashes through
the trailer of a transport truck while hanging out of Optimus Prime’s
hand without suffering so much as a hangnail.
• Whalberg and Nicola Peltz had better romantic chemistry than what we
see between her and Shane Dyson who is supposed to be her boyfriend.
• China’s military has the worst response time regarding giant robots battling through the streets of Hong Kong.
• Surprisingly little U.S. military action for a Michael Bay film.
• Optimus Prime riding a fire breathing robot T-Rex is pretty damn cool.
If someone were to write a biography about Michael Bay the filmmaker it would most likely be subtitled “
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
For he is a man who simply does not seem to care about story or
character. As long as things are explodey and are flying at the screen
he thinks he’s done his job, and for the many people who were cheering
the events as they unfolded on screen maybe he has, but for me it’s just
a shallow light show with no soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment