At some point, you must know when to say when, realize when it’s time to finally say goodbye. Five films deep into the series, for Michael Bay, “Transformers: The Last Knight” is the bombastic filmmaker’s bon voyage to the franchise and he’s looking to go out on top, bro. However, obviously not registering restraint, Bay also fails to understand the meaning of last call. So, for his grand, overstuffed sendoff the director goes for broke and detonates the biggest fireworks spectacle of his career with characteristic excessive force. Bayhem reigns supreme, but even by the coarse helmer’s overindulgent standards, ‘The Last Knight’ is nonsensically overwrought.
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The would-be blockbuster to end all blockbusters, Bay takes the kitchen sink, throws it like a Hail Mary at the sun and basks in the supernova shockwave that concusses the viewer. In scale and scope, ‘The Last Knight’ is an impressive behemoth. Unfortunately for Bay, it’s also an unbearable disaster of epic proportions, an incoherent mess with a plot so convoluted its impaired story points to signs of narrative brain damage and a writer’s room depleted of oxygen and snacks.
The story of ‘The Last Knight’ such as there is one, is tortuous and painfully overloaded. There’s “the secret history of the Transformers” backstory that reveals robots fought together with King Arthur’s knights, the samurai in ancient Japan, and alongside the allies in WWII to name a few key historical turning points and epochs.
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Then there’s the story of Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), passed on from “Transformers: Age Of Extinction,” now a fugitive living on the fringes with the Autobots wanted by the TRF (Transformers Reaction Force) and the teenaged Hispanic orphaned rebel (Isabela Moner) who hopes to join his band of renegades. Two more to go: the story of Optimus Prime seeking to meet his maker on Cybertron (which leaves him out of the picture for most of the movie), and then in jolly England, the tale of erudite, eye candy professor Viviane Wembley (Laura Haddock) and astronomer Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins, phoning it in, but having fun doing so), the latter of whom knows a thing or two about Transformers and their myths on Earth.
Somewhere within that bloated tale lies the “real plot” concerning Merlin the wizard, an ancient staff, the heir apparent who can wield it, and a mysterious talisman for the chosen one. All of this is mashed preposterously together to try and say something about legends, sacrifice and heroism. But it’s like shouting into a hurricane — a whirlwind of a story told turgidly with flash pots of ridiculous hyperbole going off everywhere. It’s an overwhelming, grotesque, often laughable last hurrah.
Channeling all his monster drink sensibilities, all the odious hallmarks of vulgar Bayisms are present: the oversexualized visuals, cleavage-sporting babes, the crude and sexist humor, streets-is-talkin’ racially insensitive stereotypes, buffoonish, minstrel-esque sidekicks, relentless slow motion, and a swelling musical score that rises from one climax to another. ‘The Last Knight’ piles on crescendos.
Running about two hours and twenty-five minutes, ‘Transformers 5’ isn’t quite the grueling slog the unbelievably stupid and interminable ‘Age Of Extinction’ (close to three hours), but it’s worse in its own ways. Featuring an exorbitant amount of expository technobabble, gibberish and incomprehensible plot points, everything on the written page, including the awful dialogue, is ham handed. The worst monologues, however, are saved for Optimus Prime — risible, drama-halting soliloquies about battle that are ripped out of the pages of a grade school version of Henry V’s “into the breach” speech. Each oration just sounds like a commercial for the very next scene that should end with an “and I approve this message” tag.
Finding any value in ‘The Last Knight’ is difficult and, mind you, the original “Transformers” and ‘Dark Of the Moon’ had their action-impressive moments. The movie twinkles for a moment at the return of John Turturro — easily the best supporting character in the original trilogy — but his appearance is simply unjustified nostalgia for the three people that care about ‘Transformers’ canon. There’s a few seconds when the action compels, but it soon turns deafening.
Perhaps to no one’s surprise, many scenes and characters have no rhyme or reason to them. Steve Buscemi turns up voicing an Autobot only to completely disappear from the story immediately after one scene. Similarly, the aforementioned teenager (Wahlberg calls her JLO at one point) seems crucial to the story early on, but quickly vanishes after the first act. She’s also given a buddy, R2D2-like robot at one point that serves next to no purpose. The overdone ‘Last Knight’ appears to have packed anything and everything inside its trunk. Yes, there’s a post credits scene. No, no one knows what any of it means.
Its melodramatic action finale is the same. There’s generous destruction porn, a world engine machine threatening to destroy Earth, and about three violent climactic battles that, of course, include a deus ex machina too. Characters fall to their death only to escape by a hair’s breadth. They survive another near-death situation only to find themselves in another do-or-die scenario. It’s like a parody of a Michael Bay film, like a “Spinal Tap” amp with the volume constantly set at 11.
One might argue the “core ideas” of “Transformers” are present, at least the basics provided by the toys and cartoons: robots in disguise who have lived among us for centuries. However, nowhere in this ugly, surface frenzy is anything more than meets the eye (zing). ‘The Last Knight’ is like a Red Bull-charged Bay yelling “I regret nothing!” as he jumps out of a plane backwards with no chute, detonating a megaton nuclear explosive while firing Uzis at his skydiving pals above him because hell, dude, that sounds like a wicked fond farewell. [D-]