Not Even a Good Film in Disguise.
I’m quite a tolerant and open-minded person when it comes to film. I enter every film hoping to, at the very least, like it. And if I don’t like it, I remind myself of the philosophy that no one sets out to make a bad film, and then focus on what they attempted to do and failed to accomplish. In other words, it takes a hell of a lot for me to truly hate a film. I rarely turn films off if I don’t like them, and I’ve never once walked out of one. Transformers: The Last Knight nearly broke me. Michael Bay’s latest faeces smear of a film tested every ounce of my strength and willpower, to the point where I actually feel like a stronger man for getting through it. If it wasn’t for the sole purpose of writing this review for you, good reader, I would have tapped out. The Last Knight is that special kind of bad film that makes you rethink every known standard for a bad film; the type that actively makes you feel like a worse person for watching. It’s a soul-destroying, nightmare-inducing, brain-numbing abomination that appears to have nothing but utter contempt for its audience and the principles of basic storytelling. And it’ll no doubt make truckloads of cash, because this is Michael Bay’s hell, and we’re just living in it.
The Last Knight sees the humans at war with the Transformers. Optimus Prime has been taken hostage by his maker Quintessa after discovering Cybertron’s destruction, brought on by his self. Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager (whose name is still so infuriatingly ridiculous that it makes me cringe every time it’s said) discovers an ancient talisman that harks back to the days of Merlin (Stanley Tucci, weirdly not reprising his role from Age of Extinction) and the Knights of the Round Table (2017’s hot blockbuster trend, apparently), that will help uncover secrets about the history of the Transformers that will then help prevent the complete destruction of Earth. Or…something.
This is obviously a completely ridiculous premise, even for a Transformers film. And you know what? If Bay had an ounce of legitimate creativity and artistic flair, he may (emphasis on ‘may’) have pulled off something somewhat interesting. Bay being Bay, though, means that we’d be absolutely kidding ourselves to expect anything like that. Instead, we’re slapped into an artistic dead zone, devoid of any desire to present anything resembling an interesting idea or inspired filmmaking. It’s a dull cesspool of the usual Bay quirks, i.e. non-humour, loud noises, obnoxious yelling, sexism, racist stereotypes. Business as usual, then. What makes this one worse than what we’ve seen before is that there seems to be a notable level of ineptitude in the way this one was written and made. It’s so tonally indecisive to the point where it causes serious whiplash, ensuring that its ridiculous concept remains as idiotic as it sounds. We jump from scene to scene, character to character, location to location with no sense of coherency or through line. It’s almost as if the script was thrown up (literally) and pieced together at random. The editing is surely some of the worst I’ve seen in a major studio film in some time, at least since Suicide Squad. It makes you wonder how they could shell out $200 million on a film and yet not even be able to make a coherent one in the process. As undeniably terrible as the previous four films were, you could still identify them as somewhat coherent films. This one is barely a film; it’s a hodgepodge of poorly stitched together scenes fighting against each other.
One doesn’t go to a Transformers film for anything more than mindless entertainment. And mindless entertainment can be good sometimes. Not every film has to be Moonlight or Arrival. We’re here for one thing: watching robots beat the shit out of each other. The Last Knight takes TWO HOURS for it to get to the mindless fighting. That means you have two hours (if you’re brave/strong enough to even make it that far) of the usual Bay bullshit to sit through before you get to the thing you came here for. Bay seems to want to completely punish you for shelling out $20 for a ticket first, and then give you what you came here for. And even that is underwhelming. Anyway, by this point, you’re either too bored or too mind-numbed to even care about how it ends. Even the effects and visual splendour, one of the few things we expect polish from in a Transformers film, are oddly flat and unremarkable. The transforming has long lost its thrill, meaning that, yet again, we’re subjected to busy and yet incredibly dull scenes of CGI scrap metal being thrown around on the screen. The film also feels about an eternity long, despite it being 20 minutes shorter than Age of Extinction. Horribly unfunny scenes including Sir Anthony Hopkins embarrassingly spouting words like ‘dude’ and ‘bitch’ pad out the running time for…reasons?
Saying that a Transformers film is dumb and stupid is horribly redundant, and I’m sure some of you are saying, “well, what did you expect?” Call it mindless entertainment all you want, but there’s no excuse for bad filmmaking. If you’re five films into your megabucks franchise; if you’re spending $200 million on it; if you’re asking audiences to shell out money and two and a half (long) hours of their time…you better be sure you’re giving them something worth their time, money and energy. The fact that Transformers: The Last Knight gives you absolutely nothing of the sort is an insulting middle finger to the face. Bay doesn’t care about your entertainment. He wants to blow shit up and leer at women for his own fetishist purposes. Don’t give into him. Transformers: The Last Knight is such an aggressively awful time at the cinema that it left me nauseous. I might forget the content almost immediately, but its horrific stench is something that will last for days. If you like your own wellbeing (unlike me, apparently), do yourself the biggest favour imaginable and avoid like the plague.