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Oh look, another Transformers film…

 

Star – Mark Wahlberg

Genre – Action > Comic Book

Run Time – 2 hr 34 minutes

Certificate – PG 13

Country – U.S.A.

Awards – 1 Wins & 19 Nominations

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I think it’s fair to say the open ridicule of the Transformer movies by the critics is a little unfair. What these mostly graying middle-aged, middle-class men seem to forget is that the Transformers franchise is a KIDS movie and so should be judged accordingly. The five films so far have grossed $4.5 billion dollars so someone must like them. Director Michael Bay understands kids and knows his markets. They are young boys who are bashing robots together in their bedrooms that want to see it on the big screen, and with plenty of explosions, and the signature Michael Bay sexy girls are also beginning to creep into their thoughts. It’s all there up on the big screen. Why do the critics not grasp their job is to represent that age of the people the film is aimed at? It’s about flogging those robot toys, little else.

-The Franchise-

(2007)Transformers: $107m budget – $710m gross.

(2009)Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – £200m budget – $803m gross.

(2011)Transformers: Darkside of the Moon – $196m budget – $1.2 billion gross.

(2014)Transformers: Age of Extinction – $310m $1.1 billion gross.

(2017)Transformers: The Last Knight – $260m budget – $606m gross.

===Cast===

Mark Wahlberg      …             Cade Yeager

Anthony Hopkins   …             Sir Edmund Burton

Josh Duhamel       …             Colonel William Lennox

Laura Haddock      …             Vivian Wembley

Santiago Cabrera   …             Santos

Isabela Moner        …             Izabella

Jerrod Carmichael …             Jimmy

Stanley Tucci         …             Merlin

Liam Garrigan        …             Arthur

Martin McCreadie …             Lancelot

Rob Witcomb          …             Percival

Marcus Fraser       …             Gawain

John Hollingworth …             Tristan

Daniel Adegboyega                …             Saebert

===Plot===

So, we begin with a rather tenuous back-story where the Transformers technology gets into the hands of the Knights of the Round Table and Merlin the magician back in the day.

In the present, a year after the Hong Kong Uprising from the last film, Optimus Prime, the head of the still good Autobots, has crash-landed on Cybertron, and meets his alleged creator Quintessa. She blames Optimus for Cybertron’s downfall and brainwashes him into helping to gain Merlin’s staff, which can absorb Earth’s energy to regenerate the smoking husk of Cybertron. Optimus earns a new name, Nemesis Prime, for his loyalty. Earth is revealed to be the slumbering Unicron, the ancient enemy of Cybertron, so says Quintessa.

Back on Earth and the Transformers are now unwelcome and see as a threat, apart from in Cuba, and are tracked and hunted down by the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF), a legal paramilitary force. The U.S. military are ambivalent to the robots now, especially those humans who had worked with the Transformers before, such as Colonel William Lennox (Josh Duhamel), quietly against the ‘seek and destroy’ policy.

Renegade Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is an ally to the Autobots, helping hide Transformers from the TRF in his remote junkyard in a quarantined area of Chicago. In the zone Cade, Bumblebee and a young scavenger called Izabella (Isabela Moner ), and their Transformer companions Sqweeks and Canopy, help a group of kids who wondered in there after school evade the ERF drones. Cade receives an artifact from a dying Autobot knight, before being saved by Lennox, returning to his junkyard with the talisman.

Both Megatron and the U.S. government are now aware of the talisman’s value and power and want it, reluctantly joining forces to try and get it away from Wade. The US releases a group of angry Decepticon prisoners to aid the mission and recover the artifact. Cogman, a non hostile Transformer, appears and invites Cade to the United Kingdom to meet his employer, Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins), who has a Transformer or two of his own to lay with and lives in a huge castle, another Transformer, Hotrod, dispatched to find University of Oxford professor Vivienne Wembley (Laura Haddock), and bring her to Burton at the same time so he can fill them out on their role in saving the Earth. It appear Merlin was real and so they must track down the staff to repel the war to come.

===Results===

Transfomers: The Last Knight’s only film festival win was at the Hawaiian film critics’ awards, bagging ‘The Worst film of the Year’ gong. It also picked up a ton of Razzies. As I say the franchise, and Michael Bay, has become the arrogant films presses whipping boys and it’s not going to stop. The film is not that bad and, of course, its samey as its real mission is to sell toys to kids and cynically drag families along to the multiplexes. The success of the franchise is the special effects; the robots look brilliant and always have. The first film was great fun because of it, regardless of how hard Shia Lebeof tried to ruin it with his hammy annoying turn. That film was funny, action packed and something for both the kids and mom, why it worked. Yes they have got lazy with the sequels and going through the motions some in the franchise but it still entertaining in the way kids like. Bay makes no excuses for the films he makes and only ever makes action movies with a big grin on his face.

The film is pretty nonsensical in a way you don’t care and with three more films being committed to they feel they can write any old plot and get away with it. It’s probably time to stop but the mark up is still $500 million and so on we go. As an adult I couldn’t say I could recommend this in the way I could Dr Who but I think it’s what the kids love and so fair enough. There is tons of action and Wahlberg’s pecks for mom and a pretty girl for dad as the robots clunk each other to shrapnel. If you see anyone of the films then you have seen them all..

===RATINGS===

Imdb.com – 5.2/10.0 (110,213votes)

Rottentomatos.com – 16% critic’s approval

Metacritic.com – 27% critic’s approval

===Trailer===

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What do you think?

Written by Phillip Ellis