State-of -the-art robots, rusty formula

Part of what I do for a living is watch stupid movies. Watching things like The Mummy or Guardians of the Galaxy 2 or Passengers requires not just a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of IQ, and more importantly, a suspension of the critical faculties that would normally demand that you eviscerate such subpar movie fare; you have to talk down to such movies, indulge them as you would small children; you are required to not beat up too badly on summer movies because, well, they’re summer movies. 

Which brings us to Transformers: The Last Knight.

In this latest Michael Bay outing, which took me 90 of its 149-minute running time to make heads or tails of, Mark Wahlberg returns for the second time as the amusingly-named Cade Yeager, a would-be Texas inventor who’s hiding out from the US government which has cut a deal with the “bad” Transformers to allow them to keep things running smoothly on Earth. The only resistance comes from the Transformer Reaction Force, led by Colonel William Lennox (Josh Duhamel). Meanwhile “good” ‘bot Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) is apparently being coaxed by Cybertronian sorceress Quintessa to save his home planet by draining Earth’s energy and sacrificing its human beings.

As the last outing, Transformers: Age of Extinction, ventured to explain, Transformers came to Earth some 60 million years ago. They’ve spent the ensuing eons hatching a plot to retake the planet. We learn from a prologue that King Arthur, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table not only actually existed, but were assisted by Optimus Prime in fighting their enemies; then the story skips ahead 1,600 years to modern-day Texas, where Cade is also trying to fight against the bad Transformers, hiding out in a junkyard where his robot pals with redneck voices are less noticeable.

He is paired up with the also amusingly-named Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), an Oxford professor who might hold the key to restoring an artifact missing in England since Merlin’s time (even though she has trouble parking her Mini Cooper or walking in heels, because, well, you know, she’s a girl); and Sir Anthony Hopkins turns up as an historian full of piss and vinegar who knows what the Transformers are really up to, and just wants these two crazy kids to get together and save the Earth. And of course there are tons of CGI robots with recognizable voices (John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken) in cameo roles.

Transformers: The Last Knight may well be critic-proof, in that its target audience is essentially 12-year-old boys and adult Comic-Con attendees who think that Dinobots look cool, and never really go beyond that level of analysis. Most people outside those brackets will start experiencing serious brain ache (I certainly did) by about the 20-minute mark from the trademark Michael Bay directorial style — quick-cut banter, loud crash, looming hunks of metal, loud crash, quick-cut banter, loud crash; repeat as necessary. Still, this doesn’t mean Transformers: The Last Knight doesn’t have its charms.

For instance, I know certain people who just didn’t “get” Arrival, because the aliens in that Oscar-nominated film never blew up large city blocks, or disintegrated humans, or wreaked lethal destruction in the final act. They just stayed pretty chill in a grassy field until they could communicate better with whiteboards and stuff.

Well, the good news for Arrival haters is they will probably enjoy Transformers: The Last Knight much more, because it features aliens blowing up large city blocks, disintegrating humans on a grassy field, and wreaking lethal destruction in the final act, which is what happens in all Transformers movies and, in fact, all action movies nowadays. The current Hollywood budget allotment for movies featuring the above is $280 million. And coincidentally, that’s how much Transformers: The Last Knight cost. But don’t worry, it hopes to make that much back alone in China, which has a huge fondness for mutating robot movies and, apparently, Tom Cruise in The Mummy.

Transformers movies are a nod back to earlier, less-PC times, when Hollywood relied squarely on a Simpson-Bruckheimer aesthetic of glossy images mixed with gritty, brain-jerking action sequences overloaded with testosterone. Men were chisel-jawed and spouted sometimes self-effacing one-liners, and pretty much all women characters wore, as Wahlberg’s character puts it, “stripper dresses” (all the more effective in IMAX 3D, BTW). Those times might be here again with the Trump era. In fact, with its wrestling overtones and parade of muscle cars, Transformers might be the first movie franchise designed specifically for the Red States.

Wahlberg’s regular-guy banter and comic quips from, for instance, John Turturro sometimes lift this movie beyond the bloated CGI universe it inhabits into something possibly fun. The robots, as you would expect, are “state of the art,” which is to say they’ve found new ways to disassemble and reassemble them into cars and trailer trucks. The new antics involve submarine chases, planets crashing into planets, and the sight of Transformers wielding very large swords.

 But to deny that Transformers: The Last Knight is anything but a loud, obnoxious summer blockbuster keeping Bay’s franchise alive for an extended cash rake? As Mark Wahlberg’s character in Ted or Ted 2 might say, “That’s retahded.”