As I was watching this, I felt like I was in that episode of Rick and Morty when they were transported to Morty's teacher's dreams and everything is like some twisted, messed-up version of reality. And, much like Rick and Morty, I wasn't having fun. At all.
Transformers: the Last Knight is the sequel to that two-and-a-half hour-long dumpster fire known as Age of Extinction, and is still - still - directed by Michael Bay. It stars Mark Wahlberg among a whole village worth of side characters and - thankfully - is Michael Bay's last ever Transformers movie.
I'm a bit lost for words on how to describe The Last Knight, so I'll leave it to a .gif to sum things up. Here it goes.
I'm serious. I mean, honestly, if I was gonna be put to death unless I was able to recite the plot of The Last Knight, I would probably die. It really is a trainwreck, and it's one that is predictable as hell. But, since I like to consider myself an optimist, I'm gonna try and list down a couple of things that I liked.
Let's see...
There was a dogfight sequence in here that I thought was cool, mostly because I'm a sucker for dogfights anyway. Visually, the opening scene with King Arthur was cool. I mean, it felt like a rip-off of Gladiator, but it was still pretty rad. Hot Rod was a fun character.
There's her.
Laura Haddock is great to look at - she's really hot. Super hot - I'm really reaching here. The movie was so cluttered, you'd figure that finding individual aspects that I liked would be easy, but it really isn't.
If there's anything this movie is, it's cluttered. It's messy, it's all over the place, and so overly long and over-indulgent in itself that it never really justifies why it, specifically is two hours and forty minutes long. You read that right, which is why I posted it in italicized boldface so that you know what you're in for.
Like I mentioned earlier, the plot is a mess. Not only is it all over the place, but it's confusing as hell and it tries to cram in so many characters without ever giving them any reason whatsoever to be involved in the story. There's way too much shit that happens in this movie that, at some point, it just becomes impossible to digest. You have this whole story arc involving Mark Wahlberg's new life, you have Optimus' arc, you have the thing with the NASA people, you have Laura Haddock's boring job and her lack of a sex life - it's filled with stuff that no gives a shit about.
I didn't care for any of it in the last movie, I didn't care for any of it this time around.
All of these characters are one of two things - wasted story arcs or completely useless. Remember that little girl they featured a lot in the trailers? Yeah, she does f*ck all. She shows up at the beginning and the movie sets her up to be this interesting Rey-type character. She has no parents and she lives in this wasteland and fixes shit (which, by the way, you hardly see her do), and the movie leads you to believe she's gonna get deeply involved in this story somehow when she really doesn't. All she does is nag Mark Wahlberg and talk about how she wants to go out and fight.
She did nothing in the movie and did nothing for the plot, and taking her out of the movie would already be saving you around twenty minutes worth of time.
There's this one other guy who lives in Mark Wahlberg's junk shop but he doesn't do anything either. He simply exists to be the black guy in the movie. That's it.
By the way, he's in it, too.
But, by far, the single most useless character in this movie was John Turturro's character. He makes a return after missing the last movie and at no point did anyone think to themselves, "Hey, this movie has no John Turturro character in it."
We never wanted him in here but he was given a couple of irrelevant, unimportant, and unnecessary scenes for God knows why. He did nothing for the plot, and he wasn't funny or interesting, and he served no purpose other than to tie in to the movies before Age of Extinction. Every time he was on screen I wanted to shoot myself.
Okay, maybe not that far, but you get the picture.
Josh Duhamel also makes a return in the movie but all he really does is explain to the government guys that not all Transformers are bad. Then he disappears from the story almost completely. At one point, he stops having any lines and all he does is just motion commands to soldiers in the background.
Yeah, you read that right.
He was one of the few likeable people in the whole movie, and his character was pretty much wasted. It's a shame, and speaking of wasted characters, you're gonna love what they did to Megatron.
The biggest and baddest of all the Decepticons - the equivalent of Darth Vader in classic Transformers lore - is really just reduced to a pest throughout this movie. The previous Michael Bay movies keep setting him up as this really evil, bad-ass dude, but he really has nothing to show for it. There's no point to having all that build-up to how much of a bad-ass a character is only to just have him not live up to that expectation. I can't think of a single thing Megatron did in this movie that sold me on the fact that he deserves to be as feared as he is.
He isn't the only villain in the movie, but it doesn't matter because the main villain in here is such a pushover. It's with these sorts of characters that the plot starts to contradict itself, and I'm gonna spoil a bit of it here. In the beginning of the movie, she overpowers Optimus Prime quite easily and possesses his brain or some shit like that. But then, towards the end, she doesn't just fail to overpower Optimus Prime, but she gets taken out by Bumblebee. With one shot.
One shot. That makes about as much sense as Kyle Reese punching the T-800 in the face and killing it. It makes no sense.
Have I mentioned the dialog yet?
Honest to God, the dialog in this movie was so awkward at times, it became almost painful to listen to. The lines were hammy and clunky and nowhere near believable. I'll give you an example, okay. Everytime Mark Wahlberg is talking to Bumblebee, he finishes every other sentence with "Bee". Seriously. I mean, I could understand if he called him something like "man" or "bro" or "pare", but in conversation, you only ever say the name of the person you're talking to when you're trying to get their attention.
The clunkiness and awkwardness of the dialog really doesn't help the "humor" the movie tries to have. A lot of, if not all of it is that same brand of Michael Bay humor that feels like it was written by a bunch of really edgy - or, at least, trying to be edgy - thirteen year old boys. Not only are the jokes juvenile, but a lot of them come off as classless and tasteless. None of the jokes were funny, and none of them worked for me.
And the worst part about that was that they were trying - I could see them trying - to turn Anthony Hopkins into an extension of John Turturro's character. It wasn't funny, and it was just sad, and, if I'm being honest about it, pretty frustrating and only confirmed the fact that Michael Bay and his writing team have no shame. At all.
There's also a romance in here.
I don't think I can possibly stress enough just how bad the "romantic" lines in the movie were. I mean, sure, Mark Wahlberg and Laura Haddock did have some sort of chemistry but they start spouting off sexually suggestive lines so suddenly. Like, literally, at some point Laura Haddock starts gushing over Mark Wahlberg's biceps when just ten minutes earlier she was calling him a buffoon. None of the banter was even remotely romantic, it just sounded like two people trying to smash after they had just met. It was dumb and builds up all this tension for nothing.
In fact, that was what I hated most about this movie. There's a lot of set-up for what could be something cool but nothing ever comes of it. It sets up for things that never happen, and it was annoying as shit. For example, you see the Dinobots being focused on a lot in the trailers and in the opening scene, so you think you're gonna be in for some really awesome shit, but they do nothing past the first twenty minutes.
Really.
I came here to see Transformers fight each other and they wouldn't even give me the Dinobots. That's a damn shame.
I didn't feel any stakes in this movie either. Okay, so there's supposed to be this massive world-ending thing coming to Earth, but when it gets there, you don't see anything happening. There's no mass-extinction level sort of destruction, no gravitational anomalies, nothing entirely catastrophic, you don't even see anyone die. If you're gonna set up some cataclysm-type scenario, at least give us a reason to care.
More than anything else, this movie frustrated me. There are so many unnecessary moments that could be cut out of the movie, and would make the movie better by not being in it. It was cluttered with useless shit about characters I didn't give a shit about, and that you probably won't give a shit about either. You probably already saw this coming, so I'm gonna cut the crap and say that Transformers: the Last Knight gets a Great Mighty Poo from me.
Don't watch this movie unless you're a masochist, or, at least, a masochist with no shame or self-respect. Please don't so they can stop making this shit. If you have seen it, I wanna know what you thought by leaving a comment below. As always, this has been Rafa. Stay classy.
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