Transformers: The Last Knight (1/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 149 minutes.

Not for adults.

I thought that King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was as bad as a movie could get. Then I saw Transformers: the Last Knight and I realized that there was a lower level.

This is total and utter nonsense whose raison d’être is IMAX 3D CGI. Because the story is idiotic, a bunch of machines from another galaxy are taking over the earth, but some of them are good machines on our side. The machines are intelligent creatures and they can turn from cars into monsters with just a few flicks of the director’s computer keyboard.

Mark Wahlburg reprises his role from the last Transformers movie in 2014. Anthony Hopkins (Sir Edmund Burton) and Laura Hadlock (Viviane), an Oxford professor are in this one, also. I’m not sure quite sure why.

Directed by Michael Bay with four people getting credit for the story and the screenplay, this goes on and on and on with silly fights filled with computer-generated effects. The idea seems to be that Optimus Prime, the good guy transformer has been turned around to help the bad guy transformers terminate earth. With all these people involved in the creation, wouldn’t you think that they could come up with something that wasn’t terminally disjointed and convoluted?

I’ve always been fond of Wahlburg as an actor but he has been in some really rotten movies, like these Transformer things and the two deplorable Ted movies that are nothing but low class smut. I know he makes a lot of money on this stuff but for someone of his caliber and wealth there should be more to his life than squandering his talent making movies that don’t even qualify for the lowest common denominator just to make money. As of now, a “Mark Wahlburg Film Festival” won’t be very impressive. He’s better than this rubbish, as is Hopkins.

There is some dialogue between Cade and Viviane that tries to imply that there is some sort of budding romance. But Cade seems to have eyes only for Optimus Prime, but that’s a relationship that definitely lacks chemistry. During the film I was wondering if there is a term for a physical relationship between a human and a machine? Machineality, maybe? Obviously I had a lot of time to kill waiting for this thing to end. Eating a whole box of Junior Mints wasn’t enough.