by Joseph Rossi
My oldest boy loved Transformers: Age of Extinction.
Why wouldn’t he? It appeals to him. It’s made for him. I brought him expecting he’d love it. He asked me if I liked it. I told him I’d rather get all my teeth pulled out at once rather then having to spend close to three hours watching this pile of garbage again.
This isn’t a movie. It’s a toy commercial for hasbro toys. A very long and loud toy commercial.
Tonight, after the special Thursday night screening, I am tone deaf. This film, which I will call Transformers 4 for the sake of not having to write the rest of that stupid title, is junk. Michael Bay directed junk. Bay is his own genre. He’s a fetish director with his own cinematic vocabulary. Now that means he does what he wants without remorse. Sometimes it works (The Rock, Pain and Gain, The Island), and sometimes it doesn’t (everything else he’s made).
Michael Bay is an expert at directing action movies. He knows how to blow stuff up real good. His camera moves all over the place but we never are at a loss during the action. This time around, the robots are all identifiable; the effects team did an amazing job here with each individual creation and giving them all a personality of their own. The 3D is actually – pretty damn good. The film is shot with the medium in mind so I knew walking in it would be worth it.
But that’s the only good aspect about this dreck. Here’s the bad. Not just bad, unforgivable.
The filmmakers have made a series of films where each character is so bland and forgettable that we have no emotional connection to anyone. That’s 4 films, almost 13 hours of screen time and not one character we care about. The closest thing to a realized character is Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and he’s a CGI robot. Mark Walhberg plays a Texan with a Boston accent named Cade (who names their kid Cade?) who, along with his super sexy daughter Tessa and her race car driver boyfriend, must help the Transformers to….ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ….
Much like the last three films, no one cares. This is cinematic puke with no redeeming value whatsoever. That means it will make a fortune and the toys will fly off the shelves. Bring on part 5.
