Transformers: Age of Extinction
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci
Directed by Michael Bay
‘Bay-hem’ is in full effect during the punishing 165-minute runtime of the fourth Transformers flick. Director Michael Bay has assembled a brand new cast for Age of Extinction including Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, and Stanley Tucci, but it really doesn’t matter.
The franchise has become a mass-marketed, bloated behemoth that resembles an extended commercial rather than an actual film. To dissect the ludicrous plot would be an exercise in futility. We have the macho hero, an inappropriately dressed actress posing as a teen, a shadowy group of government villains, some comic relief, an omnipresent MacGuffin that always manages to be the source of all the transformative powers (in this case it’s dubbed the ubiquitous ‘Seed’) and, of course, massive, sentient, shape-shifting robots based on an ‘80s Hasbro toy for teen boys.
By now, Bay has established himself as a summer blockbuster-seeking filmmaker who is no stranger to a $200 million budget because his efforts are generally massive cash cows at the box office. It would be a discredit to the technical team behind Transformers to not mention the aesthetic of the movie though. The visual effects have never looked better in the series, a testament to the truly impressive pioneering work being done at ILM.
Yet, Age of Extinction’s embarrassingly expository script, written by Ehren Kruger, does exactly what the producers want – it makes a highly commercialized product accessible to adolescent males on a massive global scale; this is not heartfelt moviemaking, this is soulless, cynical pandering at its finest.
