Somehow longer than the last installment, Transformers: Age of Extinction is absolutely interminable and mind numbing with very little to engage or recommend.

When down on his luck inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) finds an old cab over semi truck and tinkers with it in his garage, he discovers that he has actually found a Transformer. Despite protests from his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) and goofy partner Lucas (TJ Miller), Cade tries to fix it rather than call the government Transformer hotline to report the find and collect the reward money that could save his family from eviction. In fairly short order, the Transformer wakes up and turns out to be Autobot leader Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) but not before Lucas calls the hotline on the sly which brings a government kill squad by the name of Cemetery Wind led by James Savoy (Titus Welliver) who is in turn taking orders from CIA operator Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) who is working with a Transformer bounty hunter by the name of Lockdown (Mark Ryan) who is hunting and exterminating Autobots while trying to find Optimus Prime. Then there is some stuff with a technology firm building Transformers for Attinger led by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci). And a lot of explosions happen and eventually some dinobots.

I love Transformers. They were a huge part of my childhood growing up and I still have quite a bit of affection for them. I am also a fan of Mark Wahlberg who I enjoy even at his goofiest. I am not a knee jerk Michael Bay hater and have defended him in the past mostly on the strength of the Rock and Bad Boys being pretty sweet. I even liked Bay’s first Transformers and have defended it bitterly to many detractors ( the second and third movies are on their own though). I say all of that to say this: I hated this movie to an almost super human degree.

Transformers Age of Extinction is such a long convoluted mess that it is really hard to decide where to start. But let’s go with long convoluted mess. With director Michael Bay’s last outing Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I liked some aspects of it but it was at least 45 minutes to an hour too long. I got to a point where I thought it was winding down and I was feeling pretty good about it and then Nope! another hour. That is how this movie was after about 15 minutes. I can’t imagine what decision making process led to this movie being 20 minutes longer than the last one but holy shit. There is absolutely no reason for this thing to be 165 minutes long.

This length most likely due to the fact that the story is needlessly complex and has more moving parts that a Transformer itself. I am not saying there should be no depth to the film but at a certain point it becomes very overloaded and when that point happens fairly early on and then a heap of more characters and story lines come in throughout the movie, right up until the end, fatigue sets in quickly and the whole thing feels like a mess of meaningless noise and nonsense. Even with a solid emotional attachment to Optimus Prime from way back, I did not give even half of a shit about anything that happened in this movie and every new twist and reveal made me roll my eyes even more and curse myself for sitting in the middle of a row so I couldn’t go to the bathroom.

One problem that I have always had with Bay’s version of the Transformers is how much focus is put on the humans in the story and how little is put on the Transformers themselves. They have personalities and distinct voices. They aren’t just code names and cool action scenes (look I know that the cartoons were just toy commercials but they all at least had personalities). Much like I said in my review of Godzilla, if I have the choice between watching giant things fighting each other and watching human ciphers reacting to it, I am going to go with the giant things. I can watch humans freak out for free on a daily basis. If you sell me a movie with giant transforming robots fighting then I that is what I want to see.

 

Age of Extinction brought a little more parity between the two camps and gave us much more individual personality to the Transformers and made them more complete characters than any of the films before. Unfortunately, the personalities were shitty and the dialogue was terrible. Also, there was some more robot racism here and I would have thought that Bay would have learned that was bad in the second film. The only real exception here was bounty hunter Lockdown. As a villain, he feels a lot like how Megatron should have felt and that was nice especially since the inclusion of Glavatron didn’t amount to very much. I will say that every time I heard Frank Welker’s voice it made me smile and the kid in me was happy, but Galvatron has very little screen time and was shoe horned into an already bloated plot.

Speaking of shoe horning characters into a bloated movie, the dinobots make an appearance here and when I say dinobots I mean Grimlock and some other random ones that could have easily been the classic characters from the show but weren’t for no readily apparent reason. I guess the Pteranodon was originally supposed to be Swoop but since he had two heads they named him something else. It doesn’t really matter given that the dinobots are barely used also ran characters but why not just leave off a head and keep him swoop? Also, if I never see Prime ride Grimlock like a horsey again I will be very happy. There was really no reason for the dinobots to be here outside of fans wanting to see them and I really would have rather not seen them at all than to have seen them like this. I get that there was always a bit of silliness to them but they felt really excessive and useless here.

Another thing that adds to the length and bloat is that while the Transformers are given more personality and screen time, the focus on the human character hasn’t really been altered or reduced and while they are new characters, they are generally pretty similar to characters in the last few movies. None of them are very interesting and attempts at personal drama fall flat in the face of complete indifference to what happens to any of them. The weirdly antagonistic relationship between Cade and his daughter’s boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor) is completely tone deaf. It is nothing new for a father to be antagonistic of his daughter’s boyfriend but Shane is so hostile toward Cade, while at the same time being completely useless, that scenes in which they bond feel unnatural and forced. The biggest issue is that way too much time is spent focusing on these people and none of the humans are as cool or interesting as transforming alien robots so why are we having to deal with them at all?

Not everything about this movie was terrible. It was very, very pretty and the photography was very well done. The clarity in the shots and the use of color and lighting were both tremendous. Likewise, the Transformers have been streamlined a bit which made the action a bit easier to see clearly and made them look a bit more classic in appearance. The effects were good and I am always surprised by how real the Transformers look in the world around them. And that is about it.

The performances are perfunctory for the most part and no one really does anything bad here but you can shape a piece of horse shit to look like a chocolate cake all you want but it is still going to taste like horse shit. So too go the performances here. Wahlberg, Tucci and Grammer do the best they can with what they have and Titus Welliver plays his part with the seriousness of a good movie but at the end of the day, the script is just horse shit. I will always love Peter Cullen and Frank Welker and they both acquit themselves well but I wish they were given something worthwhile here. Likewise, Mark Ryan does a great job and deserves better. I am not sure how Ken Watanabe didn’t punch Bay in the face while reading his dialogue for Drift and John Goodman did the best he could. It isn’t his fault that Hound was smoking a bullet shell cigar the whole time.

Conclusion [4.0 out of 10]

I have had a lot of arguments about Michael Bay movies and I feel like this film is the culmination of every negative point against him all rolled into one movie. It is overlong to such an extreme degree that the 12 hour horror movie film festival I went to the same weekend felt shorter than this movie. It was bloated and everything felt extraneous and frankly when you make the dinobots feel boring and unnecessary, you know you have really screwed the pooch. If the score seems too high it is because Mark Wahlberg’s delivery of ‘I don’t think this is a truck at all, I think it’s a Transformer’ was funny enough for two full points. Then stupidity of ‘transformium’ knocked it back down by one full point. So there you have it. Do anything else with your day than go see this movie, that is the bottom line.