The tagline for the latest Transformers film, The Last Knight says: Rethink your heroes. After sitting through two and half hours, perhaps rethinking this franchise should be taken into consideration. Warning, spoilers ahead…
The fifth installment or middle part of a new trilogy continues to try and out blast its predecessors and at the same time break some its own rules when it comes to their mythology. Perhaps it’s my own memory but I was always under the impression that our favorite Autobots, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime were new to our world. Of course we saw in Revenge of the Fallen that the Transformers helped with the building of the pyramids, did not see that on Ancient Aliens and in Dark of the Moon, they crashed landed on the moon. Now, they were part of the Knights of the Round Table and they, and specifically Bumblebee fought the Nazi’s. What? Look, I’m as willing as the next movie goer to suspend disbelief for the sake of being entertained, but it just appears that with each passing film, history is being rewritten. Ok, I digress. Let’s talk about The Last Knight.
The film opens during the time of Arthur and his Knights. Apparently the wizard Merlin was hiding the secret of a crashed spaceship of Transformers and now needs their help to claim the throne of England for Arthur. Truthfully, I’m not even sure what the story behind this film really is. It comes across as a “I have a great idea to involve the Arthur legend, how do we make it work?”
Director Michael Bay tries to link past characters namely Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf) as somewhat of a keeper of the Transformer secret with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill to name a few. Sure why not. The long (and I mean long at 147 mins) and the short of it is that the Earth is once again in jeopardy by the Queen of Cybertron, Quintessa who uses Optimus Prime to lead her battle against the human race. Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) recruits Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), a struggling inventor turned protector of the Autobots and a government fugitive as per the last film and Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), a professor of English literature at Oxford to save the world. Along the way old alum William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) joins the fight.
The rest of the film is explosions, sexual innuendo, explosions, more innuendo, explosions with innuendo and victory for our favorite robots in disguise. Much like Marvel, there are post credit scenes to set up future films and one of them felt very much like X-Men: Days of Futures Past foreshadowing Apocolypse. We’ll have to wait and see. As bad at times as the original trilogy was, they are starting to look like cinema classics compared to the last two to come around.
Directed by: Michael Bay
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Isabela Moner, Josh Duhamel, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, John Turturro, Jerrod Carmichael and Peter Cullen
PG13 147 mins
TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT – **1/2 (out of 5 stars)
May the Dork be with you,
JPB
The Dork Knight
