Does a movie about noble robots battling evil robots really need a plot? Most of us would think not, but director Michael Bay – still deeply enamoured of his metal-crunching blockbuster franchise – begs to differ. To re-invigorate the series, Bay has crafted an overstuffed, occasionally draggy film that unfolds in three, or four, or five acts (it really is and does feel that long), which miraculously manages to be quite entertaining even as it sorely tests the patience of anyone but the most adoring of Transformers devotees.
Backyard inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) takes the place of Shia LeBeouf’s Sam Witwicky: a widower who fixes up junk and takes stuff apart for a living. He’s utterly devoted to the safety and protection of his teenage daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), though he might not be that great at taking care of her daily needs. One day, he uncovers a broken-down truck crusted over with rust and dirt and takes it home, only to realise that he’s found a Transformer – one of those pesky robotic aliens who destroyed Chicago in films past and are now on the American government’s blacklist. Soon, Cade and his family are on the run, drawn into a global conspiracy orchestrated by shady ex-CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer).
You’d think that would be plenty of story for a movie about enormous transforming robots, but you’d be wrong. We’re first led to believe that Cade is up against a wicked scientific cabal led by Stanley Tucci’s money-hungry inventor, Joshua Joyce – his nefarious firm KSI is only boiling apart old Transformers, Autobots (good guys) and Decepticons (bad guys) alike, to figure out how they work. That’s pretty nefarious. But then, the narrative shifts, slips and slides into the evil designs of Lockdown, a badass Decepticon determined to hunt down Autobot leader Optimus Prime. And that’s all before the entire cast winds up in Hong Kong, and Dinobots – fan favourite alert! – rampage across the cityscape.
To Bay’s credit, this hugely awkward plotting – which results in a bum-numbing run time of 165 minutes – actually all sort of makes sense in the end, and even yields halfway decent characters. The film’s first act, in which we meet the Yeager family, establishes their dynamic very well. Bay chose quite cannily, too, with his cast. Wahlberg handles the action sequences (including a spot of parkour down the side of a Hong Kong tenement building) as well as he does the comedy – he forms a somewhat amusing, occasionally tedious double act with Tessa’s boyfriend (Jack Reynor), whom he christens ‘Lucky Charms’ with less grace than rage in his heart. Tucci, too, is probably one of the few actors alive who could pull off his character’s decidedly bumpy plot trajectory, and Grammer gives good menace as Attinger.
But the film begins to fall apart as it goes on – the relatively tight, characterful plotting at the start gives way to enormous logical inconsistencies (why are there no surveillance cameras to hinder our heroes in top scientific facilities like KSI and Lockdown’s spaceship?!). Over-the-top scenes of metal-crunching mayhem are, of course, the entire point of this franchise, but Bay shoehorns them into the film with such regularity that it begins to feel like overkill after a while. Don’t get us wrong, the visual effects are genuinely wonderful: in fact, Galvatron, KSI’s shape-shifting prototype of a man-made Transformer, tumbles through the air with arresting grace, and there’s probably very little that’s cinematically more exciting than watching Optimus Prime ride a gigantic metal T-Rex into battle. But it’s a case of too much, too often: by the end, you can’t help but feel that the film would have been a lot better if Bay had sliced off at least forty minutes of footage.
For a brief moment in time, Bay claimed that he would not return to the Transformers franchise – even he was worn out, perhaps, by the demands of staging so many explosions with so little to show for it. But return he did, with a new cast and story – and the result is, well, a bit of a mixed bag. Root around within Age Of Extinction, and there are some truly promising, well-executed moments. The characters feel fresh and surprisingly real (at least at the start), and it seems as if Bay has once again found just the right formula in balancing man against machine, as he did with the very first film. But this fourth film also bears the worst characteristics of the franchise: the inability to weight story against action, with spectacle ultimately beating restraint into submission. There’s no doubt Bay will be back for Round 5, but it’s hard to decide on the basis of this film whether that’s something audiences should anticipate… or fear.
Basically: A combination of the best and worst elements of this franchise, this manages to have both too little and too much plot – and it’s way, way too long.
shawneofthedead 