Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)

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IMDB Rating : 5.3/10 (as on 13.07.2017)

PG-13 | 2h 29min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Autobots and Decepticons are at war, with humans on the sidelines. Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth.

Director: Michael Bay

Writers: Art Marcum (screenplay), Matt Holloway (screenplay)

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆   

Chuck this mess on the scrapheap

Wendy Ide  

I would hazard a guess that Michael Bay would sooner lose his own testicles than hand over the reins of the Transformers franchise. In fact, given the swilling testosterone that sloshes around these battling space robot movies, the two are perhaps inextricably linked. Bay has effectively been waving his balls in our faces for five films now. But given this latest blitzkrieg of blah, it seems the best thing that could happen to this series would be a new director, with new ideas and, ideally, a passing familiarity with storytelling. That, or consigning the whole metal mess to the scrapheap.

Despite the fact that Bay employs his usual technique of having characters shout descriptions of what is happening on the screen (sample dialogue: “Oh my God, look at that, it’s a big alien ship!”), the plot is a car crash of impenetrable stupidity. This story hitches a lift on Arthurian legend and chucks in some Dan Brown-style ancient artefact peril, before descending into the usual bludgeoning effects-laden climax. Mark Wahlberg returns as autobot wrangler Cade Yaeger; new additions to the cast include Anthony Hopkins (eccentric aristo with a ninja robot butler) and Laura Haddock, playing Vivian Wembley, an Oxford history professor. Perhaps you need to be huffing petrol fumes (or whatever it is that the autobots run on) but 149 minutes have rarely felt so interminable.

Read full review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★ ★ ★ ★☆  

A cinematic experience of earth-shattering preposterousness

Robbie Collin,

It’s a shame that Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian, didn’t live to see Transformers: The Last Knight, if only because he would have found out what actually happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

For the climax of Michael Bay’s new film – or rather the last 45 minutes of it, because from the first shot of prologue onwards, the whole thing is nothing but climax – the director smashes two planets together, a catastrophe we’re told entails “casualties in the tens of millions” as entire cities are gouged from the earth’s surface with the nonchalance of a fingernail running across a bar of soap.

By definition, this is the largest action set-piece Bay will ever pull off – unless in his next film he just finds two bigger planets, or throws in a moon for good measure. But the sequence, in all its literally earth-shattering preposterousness, is a cinematic experience no other filmmaker could have possibly concocted.

Fighter jets arc from background to foreground in lock-tight formation, shuddering planes of rock plough into each other at neck-craning angles, giant robots slug each other with swords and rockets as one surface tilts crazily into the next. In its commitment to clashing viewpoints and gonzo geometries, the carnage is almost Cubist – and watching in 3D on an IMAX screen, my eyes spent half the time stuck out on stalks, like a Tex Avery wolf.

Stand by also for the Bay version of a strong female character, as played by The Inbetweeners Movie’s Laura Haddock: a young Oxford professor who’s described, both accurately and approvingly, as an “overeducated ivory tower princess in a stripper dress.” Oh, and Optimus Prime meets the Transformers God. Mark Wahlberg’s character is still called Cade Yeager.

Hopkins, a newcomer to the franchise, is an instructive case study. It’s not that no director but Bay could have got from the actor the performance he gives here; rather, no other director would have thought to ask for it. Simultaneously hokey and cokey, it’s a manically odd comic turn, whether the Earl is haring around London in a supercar while fending off booty calls from old flames, or threatening a plummy, David Cameron-esque Prime Minister in his Downing Street quarters with “the watch that killed Hitler”.

Do they look hot? Are they funny and/or charming? For Wahlberg and Haddock, the answer is yes, and anything beyond that would just create drag. There’s a moment when the film’s peppy pre-teen heroine Izzy (Isabela Moner) inexplicably appears in the middle of a military sortie: Wahlberg's character asks her what on earth she’s doing there, and she replies, with commendable honesty, “I don’t know.”

The things that don’t work are the things that never do. The banter between the Autobots is grating in the extreme, and the film’s pick-and-mix attitude to current pop culture is wildly undiscriminating: while the Stranger Things and Da Vinci Code bits are fun enough, there’s absolutely no call to pay homage to Suicide Squad, ironically or not. In the obliter-tainment game, Bay’s simply better than that – and on this form, he may be better than anyone.

 Read full review at telegraph.

Saves The Worst For Last

Scott Mendelson  

Transformers: The Last Knight is something I've never been able to say about a Michael Bay Transformers movie. It's... ordinary. While it looks gorgeous and has a few impressive action beats, it feels oddly run-of-the-mill and lacking much of what made the franchise stand out even as big-budget would-be blockbusters became more and more par-for-the-course. Yes, there is something to be said for Bay toning down some of his eccentricities and offering a more kid-friendly Transformers movie, but the film mostly lacks the jaw-dropping absurdity, spectacle and weirdness of the sequels. I'm glad I was able to take my older kids to see this one in glorious IMAX 3D without having to worry about inappropriate jokes and gruesome violence (and, for what it's worth, having never seen any of these films before, they loved it), but there is nothing to replace the utter madness contained in the previous installments. Whether or not it's objectively "worse" than Revenge of the Fallen, it's surely the one I am least likely to ever watch again.

I don't necessarily want to say that I missed the racist robots or conversations about the minute details of Texas's "Romeo and Juliet" law, but the filmmakers forgot to replace those elements with anything else of equal or greater entertainment value. This is the first Transformers movie that seems restrained, both in terms of action spectacle and goofy character work. And while it's a more child-friendly confection (there is no lechery, almost no human cruelty and very few on-camera human deaths), it also skimps on anything resembling drama and the gonzo spectacle that is this franchise's stock-and-trade. It turns out, if you take away the stuff that fans and critics have complained about for the last ten years, there isn't much to recommend and you end up with a Transformers movie little different from any number of conventional big-budget studio franchise pictures. Be it due to the film being it sacrificed to the gods of cinematic universe worldbuilding or merely the result of a filmmaker with nothing left to offer in this sandbox, this is the first Transformers picture that feels like it was made on an assembly line.

Read full review at Forbes

The good and bad robots once again battle it out in this latest installment of the Hasbro toys-inspired franchise.

The good news about the latest Transformers movie is that — spoiler alert! — the world gets saved at the conclusion. The bad news is that it leaves the opportunity for more Transformers movies.

This profitable franchise has not exactly enjoyed critical praise since its first installment in 2007, and Transformers: The Last Knight is unlikely to change that. But bad reviews are unlikely to dissuade the series’ fans, who enjoy seeing lots of things blown up, with director Michael Bay once again happy to oblige. That the film required no less than six editors doesn't come as a surprise.

Anyone capable of explaining the near-incomprehensible storyline deserves a prize of some sort. Suffice it to say that the world is very much in peril; there are lots of large-scale battles involving robots good and bad; and Mark Wahlberg, who returns after making his first appearance in 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, hasn’t forgone his rigorous exercise routine.

There’s no denying the narrative ambitions of the screenplay penned by three writers, with Akiva Goldsman contributing to the story. It includes a prologue set in the Middle Ages, with appearances by the Knights of the Round Table, a soused Merlin (an unrecognizable Stanley Tucci) and the Transformers, who apparently arrived on Earth a lot earlier than we thought.

Among the characters returning from previous installments are Colonel Lennox (Josh Duhamel), who makes the military look good, and Agent Simmons (John Turturro), now unhappily cooling his heels in Cuba. Newcomers include Cogman (Jim Carter), Sir Edmond’s personal robot, who bears a strong resemblance to C-3PO, and Cade’s friend Jimmy (Jerrod Carmichael), whose main purpose seems to be providing comic relief … a task at which he fails. 

The sprawling action includes a flashback depicting the Transformers battling Nazis and an explosive battle at Stonehenge that keeps you on the edge of your seat with concern for the ancient stones. And while there’s no shortage of large-scale set pieces, the storyline provides so many opportunities for attempts at droll humor, most of it involving Hopkins' dotty character, that the proceedings start to resemble drawing-room comedy. It’s all an overstuffed mess, but that was true of the previous entries as well, and audiences obviously don’t seem to mind.

Wahlberg, as usual, gives it his all, although he’s already announced that he’s departing the series after this. Haddock makes for a fun, sexy foil, and Hopkins, who’s clearly entered the baroque phase of his career, seems to be having a great deal of fun — although every time he smiles, it seems less organic to his character and more about the new beach house he’s going to buy with the money he’s raking in.

Readfull review at Hollywood Reporter

Transformers Get Arthurian in ‘The Last Knight’

NEIL GENZLINGER  

Get to the fifth installment of a film series, especially a sci-fi action one with a reputation for mindless bloat, and you can generally assume you’ll be looking at the franchise’s most dreadful offering yet. But — surprise — the fifth “Transformers” movie, “The Last Knight,” is far from the worst in this continuing experiment in noisy nonsense based on Hasbro toys. That is thanks largely to two words: Anthony Hopkins.

What Mr. Hopkins, a knighted Emmy and Oscar winner, is doing in a “Transformers” movie is unclear, but he brings a goofy dignity to the enterprise that elevates this chapter over its recent brethren. The storytelling is also an upgrade. For one thing, we finally are given a believable explanation for the purpose of Stonehenge.

Mark Wahlberg, who joined the franchise in the fourth film, the unwatchably long and convoluted “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” is back as the scruffy inventor Cade Yeager.

This movie series can only wish it had the depth and coherence of the “Star Wars” franchise, but the homage is nice, and Cogman and Edmund have some witty moments, something the more plodding sequels lacked.

Michael Bay again directs, and he and his writers (Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan are credited with the screenplay, and those three along with Akiva Goldsman with the story) put more humanity and less clanking into this installment. Mr. Bay seems to rein in his tendency for high-speed pursuits and robotic clashes somewhat, and he varies the vroom-vroom car-chase stuff by throwing in a submarine chase.

But don’t worry; if for some reason the drawn-out and incoherent battle scenes are what you liked about the earlier films, the climactic one here is still both of those things. The movie is shorter (by about 15 minutes) than the last one, though, and considerably more bearable.

Read full review at New York times