A film primarily about good robots fighting naughty robots has no business being two hours and twenty-eight minutes long. Worse, Transformers: The Last Knight is so convoluted and drawn-out that it feels like double that amount of time has passed.
Just like the rest of the series, Michael Bay’s fifth Transformers film sees the Autobots (good) fight the Decepticons (naughty) for little more reason than that’s simply what they do. And, just like the rest, it tries to crowbar Transformers lore into human history and legends, almost to the point where it seems like Earth belongs more to these big old cars with faces than to us. This time around it’s King Arthur and the Crusades, where we see that Merlin (played by a particularly silly Stanley Tucci) was given a magic staff by a Transformer, and that staff is now the key to saving the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because that same idea is literally what happens in almost every single Transformers movie to date. In the first film it was a dusty pair of glasses that held the key to saving Cybertron and now it’s a big stick. It was a flimsy excuse for a plot then, and it’s tired and flimsy now.
Mark Wahlberg is back as Cade Yeager and spends the entire film looking totally confused by every situation he’s presented with. He’s helped by Laura Haddock’s Oxford University professor Vivian Wembley, who adds a more badass air of smarts to the Transformers movies’ leading lady mould.
One of the sillier highlights is Anthony Hopkins babbling on about robots as historian and astronomer Sir Edmund Burton. Hearing an Oscar-winning actor and actual British Knight talking in-depth Autobot lore was genuinely quite funny, whether intentional or not. This is helped by his robot-butler sidekick, Cogman, brought to life by Jim Carter doing an exact impression of his Downton Abbey (human) butler character. I’d pay to see those two in their own film, solving space mysteries up and down the British coast. This, sadly, is not that movie, and their potential goes to waste.
Wahlberg and his friends end up embroiled in the plot to find Merlin’s staff and... do a thing to help the Autobots restore Cybertron to its former glory. This time they’re not only up against the Decepticons though as Bay has added another group of antagonists into the mix in the form of the government led Transformers Reaction Force (TRF). These mercenaries are tasked with ridding the world of all Transformers but serve as slight bumps in the road of Wahlberg and co.’s stick finding mission. Similarly Optimus Prime’s turn to the dark side that has been teased in multiple trailers plays out as hackneyed and as pointless as turncoat plots have always done (See: Hawkeye in The Avengers and any number of characters from the Fast and the Furious movies).
One of the main issues with the characters in The Last Knight is that they don’t just act the way they’re feeling, they announce almost every single mood they have out loud despite it being blatantly obvious. So when Stanley Tucci shows up three sheets to the wind, it’s not enough that he’s swerving from side to side on his horse like a Tom & Jerry cartoon, but he literally exclaims “I’m sozzled!” as if it wasn’t glaringly apparent. It’s as though Bay doesn’t trust his audience enough to let them work out even the most obvious things for themselves - ironic given the film’s obscene length.
There’s also no end of befuddling bots. Some have got celebrity voices - Steve Buscemi, Omar Sy, and John Goodman all bang out metallic quips - but the action moves at such an intense pace that it’s hard to distinguish bot from bot. This is particularly true of newcomer Canopy, who looks almost exactly like series regular Bumblebee except for a dirty pile of bricks stuck to his back. Add the similarities between the Transformers to an already convoluted plot, and the whole thing ends up jumping around like a massive, shiny mess.
Where Bay does impress though is his massive set pieces involving the humans. One particularly exciting action sequence involves Wahlberg running up a fallen space station which is being attacked not only by Decepticons but by giant tidal waves too. This occurs way too far into the film though after you’ve spent more than two hours following these characters around the globe. The same goes for the much-teased fight between Bumblebee and Optimus Prime and what should have been an iconic showdown just leaves you hoping for a quick resolution between these warring friends.
