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Transformers: Age of Extinction

Geographers should find the shallowest, narrowest, least picturesque cove on Earth and rename it Michael Bay. The director's Transformers series, now four movies long with no sign of stopping, is a blight on the summer blockbuster season (already a touch blighty) and a bane of critics. 'How many more of my kind must be sacrificed to atone for your mistakes?' howls a robot during Transformers: Age of Extinction, and reviewers could be heard echoing the cry as the closing credits rolled.

The new film lurches into action with several false starts, including an attack on Earth 65 million years ago by proto-Transformers; the discovery of some sort of residue of said attack in the present-day Arctic; and the introduction of the purported main characters, inventor/single dad Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and his sexy daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). Watching her gave me a feeling I'm almost ashamed to admit, but here goes: I miss Megan Fox's acting abilities.

The nice thing about this rambling, unfocused beginning is that if you get stuck in traffic and arrive at the cinema 40 minutes late you'll have no trouble catching up with the plot. And if your cellphone rings and you have to leave 40 minutes early - again, no real harm done. And even if both these events should coincide, you'll have more than an hour of middling middle, which is more than anyone needs of this movie. The last time I saw something so long, so loud and so boring, it was digging a new subway tunnel.

Age of Extinction picks up several years after the last Transformers movie, which you'll recall ended with an Autobot/Decepticon smackdown in Chicago. Since then, most of the alien robots, good and evil, have been destroyed or gone into hiding. So too has the human cast of the first three movies - you won't find a single familiar face among the new players, unless you count those with grills and headlights.

Instead we have Stanley Tucci as an entrepreneur who thinks he's figured out a way for humanity to create its own Transformers. (Because that's exactly what humanity needs.) Key to his plan is a new element, Transformium, which I think sits between Adamantium and Unobtanium on the periodic table of fictional elements, occupying the same group as MacGuffinium. Kelsey Grammer is an evil CIA type, with Titus Welliver as his chief henchman.

Tessa also has a boyfriend, played by Ireland's Jack Reynor. He's an expert driver, which is something of a waste in a film where self-aware vehicles are forever ejecting their human passengers and driving themselves. He never gets too close to Tessa, either, since Wahlberg does the protective-daddy thing so well. (Hey, a guy's gotta act where he can.)

There are also a handful of Chinese characters, and a sudden shift in setting to Hong Kong late in the film. This is in response to Chinese investment, and might also explain why one character feels the need to contact 'the Central Government,' which we're assured will fully defend its people from all threats foreign, domestic and extraterrestrial. And the Chinese Communist Party is only one item being shilled; there's so much product placement in the movie that the best way for the humans to avoid harm would be to hide behind something without a logo on it.

Of course, the biggest product is the Transformers themselves, which turn 30 this year. After Wahlberg's character unearths head honcho Optimus Prime, they start popping up all over the movie to fight with each other and with the humans, and to once again lay waste to large parts of Chicago and, later, Hong Kong. The battles have incredible stamina but no sense of pacing - most of them are the cinematic equivalent of banging your head against a brick wall.

This could be why, by the movie's third hour, I was starting to feel a little punch-drunk, uncertain just where the bad-guy robots had got their hands on a huge spaceship; why it needed to be tethered to the tallest building in Chicago; or how the good-guy 'bots came to be riding huge metallic dinosaurs.

But none of it really matters. Transformers: Age of Extinction, despite the hopeful ring of finality in the title, is merely another chapter in the saga, and far and away the worst one so far. With the inevitable Transformers 5, Bay has nowhere to go but up. Then again, he might surprise us.

Post By http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/06/27/transformers-age-of-extinction-reviewed-michael-bay-presents-three-hours-of-his-worst-work-so-far/