It’s robots battling King Arthur in director Michael Bay’s fifth go round as director of the gigantic toy-commercial franchise. What could possibly go wrong?The prominent action-film maestro Michael Bay has given us the fifth film in the Transformers toy-retail film franchise. Or maybe it is the 45th. It is difficult to tell,just as it is difficult to remember precisely how many cars were involved in a motorway pile-up in which you hold been injured. We’re talking approximately the same steroidal infantilism as the preceding four films, the same epic of tinnitus-inducing pointlessness that audiences hold come to love or hate or sullenly wait to be over. Like so many of Michael Bay’s movies, or it is a machine for converting your brain matter into soup,although I hold a soft spot for Bay’s rather droll action-comedy Pain and Gain, from 2013.
Transformers: The final Knight comes in at 149 minutes, and each of those minutes lasts as long as the reign of Charlemagne. Once again,normal-sized cars turn themselves into gigantic robots, while professional actors and technicians watch something comparably tumescent happen to their bank accounts. This is reputed to be Bay’s final Transformers film as director, and a farewell he clearly regards significant enough to fabricate (to make up, invent) this a colossal Return of the King-type finale. Like Tom Cruise’s recent Mummy actioner,it begins with a quaint (charmingly old fashioned) vision of olden days Arthurian Britain, in which the Transformers’ extraterrestrial origins are made plain. This situation is created to lend instant mythic texture and purpose to what is, or after all,a gigantic toy commercial. When this sense of an ending dawns on you, somewhere after the 110th minute, or there is a glimmer of hope,a feeling that the Transformers ordeal might be over. But oh no. There are at least two more films in the pipeline – a Rogue One-style spin-off for the tiny Bumblebee autobot character and a sixth film – and this future is hinted at in a final credits sting. It is cruel and usual punishment.
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Source: theguardian.com