There’s only one thing anyone really needs to know about Transformers: Age of Extinction, Michael Bay’s fourth exercise in robot-on-robot violence and aggressive product placement: at nearly 3 hours, it’s the longest Transformers movie yet.
Any mention of the leaden dialogue, wooden acting, laugh-free jokes, deafening volume and enough explosives to knock the Earth off its axis would just be piling on.
The shame is that it didn’t have to be this way. Even though the franchise is really just one long commercial for Hasbro’s Transformers toys, the first film, the one in which humanity initially came into contact with the warring intergalactic robots who can shape-shift into cars, trucks, and awesome weaponry, had a sense of humor about itself.
The follow-up, Revenge of the Fallen, was unwatchable, but the third movie, Dark of the Moon, showed fits of inspiration.
With Extinction, Bay had a chance to start from scratch. The human cast from previous films, including star Shia LaBeouf is gone. Taking LaBeouf’s place at the heart of the story is workhorse Mark Wahlberg — not a bad trade. But the biggest reason why Age of Extinction should be better can be summed up in one word: dinobots.
Die-hard fans of these half-robot/half-reptile creatures from the Transformers cartoons have been waiting for three decades to see their heroes — led by the less-than-eloquent but stout-hearted Grimlock — portrayed on the live-action big screen. Who doesn’t like the idea of a robot-dinosaur mash-up?
Well, Bay apparently, because the dinobots show up late in the movie and don’t have much to do but serve as handmaidens to the good-guy Autobots in their perpetual brawl with the bad-mood Decepticons. What a waste.
The story centers on a failed, impoverished Texas inventor, Cade Yeager (Wahlberg), who with his pal Lucas (T.J. Miller), stumbles across a trashed big-rig truck. Of course, it’s not just any truck, but chief Autobot Optimus Prime — who is not only being hunted by Decepticons but also the humans.
In the previous films, humans and Autobots were allies, but now — in the wake of the massive Autobot/Decepticon war that destroyed Chicago — humanity is sick of all of them. But it’s up to Cade, his daughter (Nicola Peltz) and her boyfriend (Jack Reynor) to show the world that the Autobots are still worth fighting for.
On the other side, the CIA, through devious Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), is scheming to destroy all the remaining robots and send their parts to a robotics corporation run by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci, the best part of the movie). His job is to create a new generation of robots that will be subservient to human desires.
Bay has been making a lot of noise about how this is the first film to use the 65 mm IMAX 3D camera and, yes, some of the special effects are impressive in this $165 million spectacle.
But a few more bucks on the script would have been a better investment, because having our heroic robots yelling “Die, b----!” and “This one’s for you, a-hole!” is snickering, pandering, lazy writing that Beavis and Butt-Head would have found insulting to their intelligence.