Growing up in the eighties you had to use your imagination to bring to life toys like G.I Joe, or the Transformers. Becoming as popular as they did, they found their way to the small screen in animated form where they would show off their bad shooting skills every Saturday morning. Things got real though when they brought those animated characters to the big screen where we saw death and got a pretty cool theme song. Just think how happy all those fans got when Paramount announced the first Transformers film in 2007; it would make the perfect summer movie. While we had high hopes, Michael Bay decided to play the Grinch and give us a movie we could stomach, but not the one we wanted. Now two sequels later and the downward trajectory the franchise has been taking, we get a new entry into the series, Transformers: Age of Extinction.
Gone are all the characters from the first three films, well except a few Autobots. Instead we find our self in Texas where we meet an inventor named Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) who just can’t seem to get anything to be that break out invention he is looking for. He has a daughter named Tessa (Nicola Peltz) who he is overly protective of, even though it is she who is taking care of him. Everything changes when he buys an old truck to salvage parts from, and discovers it is one of those transforming things. The Government, who is hunting down all the remaining Transformers, finds out he has found Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and sets out to finish the job of ridding Earth of all the Transformers, good or bad. They all escape and discover there is someone who is helping the Government and who wants Prime for themselves. It is once again up to the Autobots to save the Earth with a little help from some new friends.
Going into this film you pretty much know what to expect. You will get lots of explosions, slow motion action, a good amount of camera tilting up from a lower angle, and a few good 360-spinning camera shots, in other words a Michael Bay film. It seems as the quality of the film goes down, the box office total goes up, but that should change with this film. The quality has picked up speed in its decent, but there is a good shot the box office will not reach “Dark Side of The Mood’s” peak. With a story written by Ehren Kruger, who has been involved since “Revenge of The Fallen, which also marks the beginning of the decline of an already average film, it is easy to guess what you will see with this story. The new cast did nothing to help the film, but neither did the below average script that often missed its mark with its jokes. The film takes way too long to get into the action, which is why anyone would want to see this movie in the first place, which doesn’t help its way too long run time of just over two and half hours. The only thing that is entertaining is Peter Cullen, who I could listen to read anything in the Prime voice. Michael Bay has shown he can make entertaining films, like “Bad Boys” and last year’s “Pain and Gain”. He does great with smaller budgets, but give him more money and he can give you an equally terrible film. With “Transformers 5” already announced we have the comfort of knowing it can actually get worse, if you can call that comfort. For now we have a film that is a lot less than meets the eye, and then pokes it after taking your money.
Brian Taylor
