TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (2014)

Originally published at Cinema Knife Fight, June 29, 2014.

I'd promised to review this one solo because a couple of years back I did the previous Transformers movie with Michael Arruda. Of course, by the time I needed to go see this one I was exhausted and malnourished. Long story.

I talk about it below in my rather entertaining slam of a film that probably didn't deserve... well, never mind It probably did. :)

So, next time a Transformers™  movie comes out and it looks like I’m about to volunteer to review it, someone please shove a Hasbro® toy into my mouth.

My eyes hurt. They were watering when I left the 3D showing of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (2014). The girls working the counter were looking at me like I was some weirdo who gets all emotional at massive-budget fighting-toy movies. I don’t, not normally, but at times it did feel like I was going blind. Pixelated shapes are still dancing around the edges of my vision—Michael Bay’s mechanical mayhem is burned into my retinas.

I went to the 3D showing only because it was earlier than the 2D, and since it was before six o’clock in the evening the price wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Did I enjoy the movie? No. I had many other things I wish I’d been getting done like cutting the grass and finally opening the pool. But I’m old, and those things thrill me. However, will someone who has enjoyed the Transformers® movie franchise thus far enjoy this movie?

Yes, without a doubt.

In much the same way I enjoy every minute of a well-made Marvel super-hero film, fans of Optimus Prime™ will revel in this orgy of explosions, transformational sequences gone wild, and pretty girls in short-shorts screaming for help… the usual formula for this sort of thing. In this film’s case, throw in talking alien robot thingies which somehow seem to be modeled after various races here on earth, even though they were made in some distant galaxy, and you’ve got a testosterone- and oil-filled recipe for success.

Unlike when Michal Arruda and I reviewed TRANSFORMERS: SOMETHING ABOUT THE MOON (2011), where every scene featuring the Transformers© themselves made me cringe—except Bumble Bee, I like Bumble Bee, because he talks using his radio and he’s funny —this time around I wasn’t as turned off by them. One reason is simply that I’m more used to them (being just a slight too old to have been a fan of the Transformers™ cartoon or comic in its Prime (pun intended). And yes, I’m using the ™ and ® symbols just to be annoying. I’ll stop now.

However, the storyline with Optimus Prime and his buddies was a little better this time around. There was more backstory as to who, or what, these shape-shifting soldiers of salvation are. A highly advanced race created them, for an unstated purpose, and Optimus Prime is one of an elite group of Knights, who went rogue a long, long time ago. Something like that. Maybe current fans of the series know this already, but it was new to me. Also, though they are manufactured, they are also alive, partly from the core material they are built from, a programmable matter which is alluded to in the cool opening scene of the film and explained better later, and partly from their core, or soul, which is their life source. (This latter part I actually learned when I reviewed the previous movie, TRANSFORMERS: GOODNIGHT MOON, 2012).

Now, AGE OF EXTINCTION takes place five years after the events of the previous film, and the world is reeling from the climactic battle which decimated Chicago. Pieces of the destroyed Autotrons (the good Transformers, like Optimus Prime) and Decepticons (the bad ones) are being sold on the black market. One company, headed by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci – THE HUNGER GAMES, 2012, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, 2011) is trying to harness their technology to develop its own brand of Transformer. In the meantime, a CIA Black Ops organization, headed by a former high-ranking official, Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer—from the FRASIER TV Series and X-MEN THE LAST STAND, 2006), is methodically hunting down the remaining Decepticons and Autotrons with the help of a new transformer-like creature named Lockdown. Lockdown is working with the CIA to find Optimus Prime and return him to their planet so he may again serve their mysterious creator. The CIA is also in cahoots with Joyce’s company to build an army of robots, and the Autobots are in hiding until they understand why the humans are hunting them. Optimus Prime joins forces with a new human ally, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg – THE FIGHTER, 2010, LONE SURVIVOR, 2013), who is a struggling robotics inventor trying to raise a daughter alone and keep their home from being foreclosed on, hoping in the meantime to find that one, big invention. Well, the “one big invention,” Optimus Prime, ends up in his barn and…

…this is a long way of saying this movie has a lot of running storylines.

Which is probably why it takes two and a half hours to neatly wrap up each thread in Ehren Kruger’s screenplay, after which we’ve blinked through our nineteenth destruction-laden fight scene and mourned for the roughly 40,000 human casualties (still less than MAN OF STEEL (2013), however).

Personally, it was too much show and bang, and very little depth. Maybe I look for a little something more in the films I watch, but you do not walk away any richer mentally or emotionally for having seen this movie. It’s really expensive (to make) junk food. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what its intent is. As I write this review, I hadn’t eaten much all day—no time to—and what I did eat was nutrition-free: a Burger King croissant breakfast sandwich at 8:00 am, then nothing until 1:00 pm when I had a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Yes, mostly cheese with pasta and bread to help gravity pull it down my esophagus. Then a bag of popcorn and Twizzlers at the theater. That’s it. Bad eating day. The point I’m making is that I ate the equivalent of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION, and I’m going to pay for it tomorrow.

I think Mark Wahlberg was a good choice to replace social media’s latest mob lynching, Shia Labeouf. I’ve enjoyed Wahlberg’s work, and he does add an everyman dimension to the film. The storyline with his daughter and later-discovered boyfriend was kept fairly shallow. However, the fact that his daughter had a secret boyfriend was just as troubling to him as certain death from the government trying to kill his family and all the explosions and alien missiles fired at him, was a nice touch. A father would react this way in most cases, I’d think. This is an ongoing bit between him and the boyfriend played by Irish actor—and Chris Pratt lookalike—Jack Reynor (DELIVERY MAN, 2013).

The effects, especially in 3D, are as good as DARK OF THE MOON (yes, I really do know the title of the previous film). Though we’ve seen these effects in many other films since said movie, it’s still stunning how they can incorporate actual places and buildings and insert monsters and destruction and blend them together seamlessly. In this case, aside from Texas highways and a couple of other American cities, we’re talking the protracted latter scenes in Hong Kong. I imagine if you know these cities, it must be wild to see what Bay’s folks do to them on the big screen.

Like I’ve said, fans of the man’s earlier films—and the franchise itself—will very likely be blown away by the movie. It is slightly better than the previous film, which was itself quite popular. Wahlberg does well taking up the mantle of leading man in this film, and Kelsey Grammer is spot-on as the quietly evil black ops government leader. He plays him with such intensity he chews up any scene he is in, which unfortunately isn’t enough (since they needed to make room for yet another battle scene). Grammer does Bad Guy quite well, and I’m glad he was there to add a wee bit of depth to it all. Tucci’s character began as an ambitious, and slightly evil scientist, but as time went on he became the comic relief—so much so in the latter half that it was a put-off. Unless you introduce a character in this way early, don’t push his comedic side midway through—it seems unrealistic. Not that some of the humor wasn’t funny—it was—but didn’t always fit with how he’d been played earlier.

One character who I would have enjoyed in more scenes is Tucci’s assistant Su Yueming (Bingbing Li – RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION, 2012). A martial arts expert (you know, Hollywood, just because you introduce a culturally-Japanese character you don’t have to make them martial arts experts!), she’s apparently not just his assistant but secret bodyguard and eventual love-interest. She did well with what she had, and I feel she could have done more if given the chance.

Now I know the Transformers themselves are a constant here, so there’s no need to complain that a supposedly alien race are designed to appear and behave with various human ethnicities… specifically John Goodman (ARGO, 2012, MONSTERS UNIVERSITY, 2013) voicing the bearded, hillbilly Autotron, and Ken Watanabe (GODZILLA, 2014,  INCEPTION, 2010)  voicing Drift, who speaks and looks like an ancient samurai warrior… but I will complain about one minor technicality which irked me in the previous film. Transformers, as far as I can tell, don’t breathe. So when they fight, or are mad, there is no need to have them exhale in gassy breaths through their “nostrils.” Unless they do breathe, and I’m just ignorant of their anatomy. Someone enlighten me in the comments section?

So, in conclusion, TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION is an ambitious, action-packed addition to Hasbro’s story of the Autotrons, and if you are a fan, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re like me—someone who really hasn’t been into them too much—save your money and see something with a little more (healthy) meat to it, and maybe a side of veggies.

For me, I give it 1.5 Knives.

For any Transformer fan out there, I’ll allow 3 Knives.