Michael Bay is as talented as he is prolific. Which is not necessarily a good thing. He has made countless films that I have enjoyed. But do we need to keep making The Purge sequels? Or Bad Boys sequels? Or the umpteenth Transformers movie? The Last Knight is the fifth in the series, with a seventh already planned for 2019 and a spinoff featuring Bumblebee due out next year. Enough already. I love the franchise. But based on the current film, this series has played out. It seems the only reason to make more of these films is some sick competition to do more bad sequels than Fast and Furious.
With that opening paragraph, you probably think I hated this film. I didn't hate it. But I hate to see talent wasted on something that isn't up to par. In this film, Optimus Prime becomes the bad guy, we get a backstory that involves the Knights Templar, and Mark Wahlberg once again saves the world from destruction. It is getting formulaic with more outlandish plot lines. The narrative has gotten to the point of ridiculous. A band of misfits saves the planet from destruction. And the transformers are really our friends. And they are just misunderstood. And the world is on the brink of collapse. It's the same story. Just wearing an uglier dress.
Other than Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Hopkins, the human actors are relatively unknown. Although there is a cameo by Stanley Tucci as well. I thought the acting was fine. And the CGI was amazing. As always. But you can't keep building films around special effects and decent acting. Without a worthwhile plot, it just feels like a waste of time to me. The characters were pretty flat, the plot was predictable, the dialogue was forgettable. The pacing wasn't even great. This film could easily have cut ten or fifteen minutes and I don't think I would have missed anything. The storytelling just lacked the impact that the cinematography, large budget and acting deserved.
If you are a fan of the franchise, this one will be fine to watch when it hits your streaming service. You may miss the impact of the big CGI watching on a smaller screen, but the story just isn't worth paying full price to see it in the theater. I'm not going to go as low as IMDB on this one, but I'm probably being generous with a 6/10 rating. I liked it more than I didn't like it. It just felt wasteful to me not to have a better story, or invest this effort into a new franchise.
