A Review of "Transformers: The Last Knight"

"Holy shit, it's Anthony Hopkins! What on Earth are you doing here?"
"My dear boy... I haven't the foggiest idea, I just know I want my money."
♫ Whaaaaaaaat I've doooooooone, I'll faaace myseeelf... to cross out what IIIIII've beeeeeeecome ♫

Oh cripes alive. Another one? Give me a break. Yeah, yeah: "Happy Friday" and blah, blah, blah. Welcome back to another Michael Bay Transformers movie, and thankfully the last one he did that's on our list. We've endured a whopping four of these, and there appears to be no end in sight. While Age of Extinction wasn't groundbreaking, I personally think it wasn't as bad as it could've been or was made out to be... and enjoyed it for what it is which is a little long, kind of dull, and winded. Still pretty entertaining though.

I don't remember one of these kids. Not one.

... but Transformers: The Last Knight is a whole inhuman batch of "What in God's Holy name is this?!" Man, I suffered the whole two and a half hours through this one this week and Jesus CHRIST alive, this movie is one giant, boring, meandering, mess of a storyline that I swear the Transformers were just shoe-horned into for marquee value. Yes, the year is 2017 and Michael Bay is at the helm again, as I mentioned, I can tell he... even HE... didn't give a shit anymore. He just didn't care. He phoned it in just like Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, and even Anthony freakin' Hopkins did. Yeah that's right, somehow this movie roped in Anthony Hopkins and convinced him into accepting a role. How? I'm not exactly sure; but I'm sure Hopkins' next-of-kin were kidnapped and held at ransom. Somebody search the 2017-era newspapers of the world, I'm sure we'll find something. No? Perhaps he owed a very serious sum of money to some unscrupulous business people. I don't know, but he definitely may have had a massive student loan or something at minimum. Let's tear into Transformers: The Last Knight and figure out why this one, like Revenge of the Fallen before it blows a hole in the hull of this franchise.

This Transformers movie opens oddly enough in 484 A.D., where the wizard Merlin yes the wizard Merlin, you read that right... finds the Knights of Iacon, a group of Transformers hiding on Earth, seeking their help to aid King Arthur... yep, def King Arthur, you read that right too... and his knights. They hand him a staff and help Arthur defeat the Saxons, but warn Merlin to hide the staff. In the present, five years after the Hong Kong incident, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) arrives on the ruins of Cybertron and meets the mad Cybertronian goddess Quintessa (Gemma Chan), who brainwashes him into Nemesis Prime, and sends him to Earth to retrieve Merlin's staff, to restore the planet by taking Earth's energy core. 

"I have a bitch of an itch on my left cheek. Is there
something on my face?!"

On Earth, a new paramilitary task force called the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF) continues to hunt Transformers... even though I thought that the humans made peace with the Autobots at least at the end of the last movie... though, it would appear not. While some of its U.S. military personnel, including Colonel William Lennox (welcome back to the franchise Josh Duhamel) and General Morshower (You too, Glenn Morshower), are reluctantly against its actions. Cade Yeager (Mark "I'm firing my agent" Wahlberg), an ally to the Autobots, hides Transformer refugees in his junkyard. In a war-torn Chicago, Cade and Bumblebee (Erik Aadahl) meet a scavenger Izabella (Isabela Moner... starting to notice not much thought went into the characters' names) and her Transformer companion, Sqweeks (Reno Wilson), before encountering a dying Transformer who gives them a talisman. The TRF confronts Cade to demand the Autobots' location, only to be stopped by Bumblebee, Lennox, and Hound (John Goodman).

Megatron (Frank Welker), having abandoned his Galvatron identity... frickin' off screen somehow... and his remaining Decepticons, and the U.S. government learn of the talisman's value and reluctantly join forces to retrieve it and track Bumblebee to Cade's scrapyard. While the Autobots fend off the Decepticons, Grimlock (non-speaking) and the Dinobots ambush a TRF convoy while Cade, his assistant Jimmy (Jerrod Carmichael), Izabella, and Sqweeks deal with a swarm of TRF drones sent after them. Cogman (Jim Carter), a human-sized Transformer, appears and invites Cade to the United Kingdom to meet his employer, Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony "I'm firing my agent" Hopkins), who is connected to the Transformers. Burton asks another Transformer, who's French in this movie's representation for some reason... Hot Rod (Omar Sy), to find Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), a University of Oxford professor.

TRUCKASAURUS!

Burton explains to Cade, Viviane, and Bumblebee that Transformers have been living amongst mankind for centuries, their existence once guarded by a secret society called the Order of Witwiccans... hmm, Witwicky anybody? Shout out to Shia LaBeouf. Anywho, it turns out that Hopkins is the last living member. The talisman can lead to Merlin's staff, buried in a Cybertronian spacecraft under the sea. Why is Merlin's staff buried in an alien spaceship? Well, the plot explains it in the opening... but I mean reeeeeeally why? Viviane is revealed to be the direct descendant of Merlin's bloodline and the only one who can activate the staff. The local authorities, MI6, and the British TRF discover them, forcing them to flee. Following clues, while evading their pursuers, the group head to the Royal Navy Museum, where they commandeer the submarine HMS Alliance, also a Transformer, to find the spacecraft while the TRF and the U.S. Navy SEALs tail them. So yeah, to summarize... Cade, Viviane, and Cogman literally hijack a museum submarine and steal it, which is also a Transformer, btw, using it to swim to the submerged Cybertronian ship to get Merlin's staff, a wizard who up until this movie was just a goofy Disney side character aside from a character from literal folktale legend.

Continuing on this perplexing Transformers quest that hardly has any freakin' Transformers in it, Burton contacts Seymour Simmons (John Turturro), both learning that Earth is Unicron, and the staff will drain the planet's life via an access point under Stonehenge. Oh boy... UNICRON! A character who, after five movies, I've been waiting to see done in Michael Bay's live-action Transformers universe. Locating the ship, Cade and Viviane find Merlin's tomb with Viviane activating Merlin's buried staff, awakening the Knights of Iacon. The TRF and Navy SEALs ambush Cade and Viviane to take the staff but Viviane is forced to surrender it to Nemesis Prime who has arrived to take the staff. Bumblebee, Cade, and Lennox engage Optimus, during which Bumblebee speaks in his voice for the first time after he was given a spare voice box, stirring Optimus's memories and freeing him from Quintessa's control. The Decepticons ambush Optimus and Cade, stealing the staff. The Knights arrive to execute Optimus, but yield to Cade and join the humans and the Autobots upon seeing Cade's talisman turn into Excalibur... yep no Arthur's legendary sword he pulled from the stone in the legend, yep you read that right as well. Burton tries to stop Megatron from activating the staff at Stonehenge, only to get blown up. Which was a smart move on Hopkins' part... God forbid he pops up in Michael Bay's Transformers 6.

"Human, look at the size of my SWORD."
"We have guns."
"...jealous of it's SIZE and GIRTH, human?!"

As Cybertron's remains ravage Earth, the Autobots, Dragonstorm (uncredited voice actor), and the humans, now working with the reformed TRF, launches a direct assault on Cybertron to defeat the Decepticons, Megatron, and Quintessa. During the battle, Viviane removes the staff and stops the transfer. Optimus defeats Megatron while Bumblebee seemingly kills Quintessa. With both worlds saved but now attached to each other, the Autobots leave Earth to rebuild Cybertron. In the mid-credits scene, Quintessa, who has survived the battle, disguises herself as a human and approaches a group of scientists inspecting one of Unicron's horns and offers them a way to destroy him.

... only Quintessa doesn't need to destroy him at all because Transformers: The Last Knight released to horrid fanfare and a box office taking smaller than the previous four movies that came before it, thus negating not only another follow-up where the Autobots led by a tired Peter Cullen join forces with the bag-of-dicks humans in yet another tussle for... I don't fucking know, the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln which was I guess a hidden Decepticon drone or something. God this movie is really, really pushing my low tolerance for silly bullshit in a Transformers movie. Now, I get that Transformers is pretty silly enough, and you have to suspend your disbelief quite a bit already with a movie about talking robots that transform into Earth cars... but this destroyed that and leapt way, way beyond that. The whole idea of Transformers is that robots came to Earth fighting each other and in order to blend in, take alternative robot forms as Earth objects/vehicles, or if you're into Beast Wars, animals and dinosaurs.

The most "Michael Bay" picture ever.

I get because it's the fifth film, you have to really grasp for something new and fresh to tell a story about, but this is just plain silly, and you can tell every single person, lead actor, lead actress, side actor, and every Brit and Yankee in a five-mile radius of the camera didn't give a beaver's dam what performance they gave for the camera. Same with the Transformers' effects... in the first movie they felt very metallic, and every hit and thud gave us a PING and sparks. Here, the Transformers all move like they're made out of rubber. The scene where Daytrader (Steve Buscemi) shows off Starscream's severed head was the most jarring. Moved it around like it was Jell-O. It was very alarming. Not to mention, Cade just shoved this giant robot's severed head off a pile like it was nothing.

It was nice fan service to have fan favorites show up again, or at least reference other characters that could potentially appear in future sequels if this one wasn't such a disappointment. Nemesis Prime in the original cartoon series was just a Decepticon clone of Optimus... kind of like how Faker was an evil He-Man clone in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Every 80's cartoon had an evil team that had a clone of the lead good guy, I guess. Here in this movie, it was just Optimus temporarily brainwashed by Quintessa, but he called himself Nemesis Prime just get credit I guess. Also, Hot Rod makes an appearance too. Hot Rod as we Transformers fans know takes over the leadership of the Autobots in the original The Transformers: The Movie and becomes Rodimus Prime. Here, he's a French nitwit with an exaggerated Parisian accent. So again, they're tip-toeing around the core characters' inclusions... they get partial credit.

One plot-hole... in keeping with our tradition of pointing out Michael Bay's fast-and-loose filmmaking especially with Transformers screenwriting it seems... In the original film Optimus Prime told Sam Witwicky that the Autobots "learned Earth's languages through the World Wide Web..." sooo, now this backstory and other backstories in the sequels we've seen by now show us that the Transformers, at least the Autobots, have been on Earth for centuries and speaking to people like Merlin and King Arthur in perfect English as early as the Dark Ages. Sooo... yep, that one should speak for itself.

I do not recommend Transformers: The Last Knight. It is long, dull, confusing, very over-the-top, yet very underwhelming. There's hardly any Transformers action; the bulk of it is at the very end during yet another long-winded, no doubt very costly CGI final battle. Optimus isn't even in the movie for over half of it. Which is fine, because I always complained he was front-and-center entirely too often. Character development occurs off screen and it's very jarring to a casual viewer (lookin' at you Galvatron switching back to Megatron). One positive thing I'll say. It is the first movie I've seen since The Big Lebowski to have Walter (John Goodman), Donny (Steve Buscemi), and Jesus (John Turturro) all in one movie.

Skip this one. Blecch.