Friday 30 June 2017

Transformers: The Last Knight

At this point, it's got to be assumed Michael Bay is making Transformers movies largely as a cry for help. There's not a lick of logic in any of them, nor particularly much interest in most of the human characters or the various robots either. What this film offers instead is, pretty much, pure undiluted insanity. Anthony Hopkins spends most of the middle third providing a shedload of ridiculously convoluted exposition that tries to connect giant robots, Arthurian legend, a secret with ties to everythign from the American Civil War to World War 2, references to the earlier films in the franchise and a sudden outburst of robot horns from the earth.

If that sounds compeltely ridiculous - congratulation, yes it is. There's also a shooting style that has scenes changing aspect ratio constantly between cinemascope and widescreen, distinguished character actresses contributing scenes where their prime objective is to get a young woman laid, wasting the voice talents of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi, random scenes throwing in John Tuturro and Josh Duhamel playing their roles from previous roles in the franchise with no real impact on the action of the film and a lot of random yelling at things while other things explode.

Look, this is does have the occasional entertaining spot when it calms down for five minutes and remembers to be the same film for a little while (Hopkins exposition spurt is probably the highlight, followed by his mildly psychotic robot butler, voiced by Downton Abbey's butler, Jim Carter). But largely this is loud, yelling nonsensical empty calories. It's never exactly dull, but that's largely because it's too loud to be dull, and because Bay's attempt to have a sense of humour is so weirdly at odds with anything actually funny.

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