Transformers: Age of Extinction

Is there any excuse available that will justify spending 2 hours, 45 minutes to watch this film? Or why I am gifting it three stars? It was a free rental at Redox. I normally enjoy Mark Wahlberg movies. I love Bumblebee. Do any of these hold water? I know one thing that doesn’t hold a lot of water – the story. Does it really matter at this point in the franchise? There are good guy Transformers called Autobots and bad guy Transformers called Decepticons and standing between them are stupid humans that betray their species for profit – normally it’s the U.S. Government. BUT wait – there is one hero that will change all of this and talk Optimus Prime (Autobot Boss Daddy) into fighting one last battle (for the fourth or fifth time – I’ve lost count at this point) while some hot-looking woman runs around explosions in short-shorts. You now know all you need to know about the entire Transformer franchise. For this incarnation we trade out Shia LeBeouf for Mark Wahlberg and Courtney Fox for Nicola Pelz. And now for the twist…wait for it… Mark Wahlberg plays Nicola Pelz’s FATHER. That’s right – the FATHER. Yeah, it totally doesn’t work. At all. There’s a point in

I guess even Michael Bay must have realised that by the fourth outing, this franchise needed refreshing. To that end, the previously long-suffering cast have been allowed to hang up their screwdrivers and a new set of characters have been drafted in. They are led by "Cade" (an enthusiastic Mark Wahlberg). Now he just happens to buy an old truck and it just happens to turn out to be the long lost "Optimus Prime". Of course, there are still agencies hunting for the robots and soon he and daughter "Tessa" (Nicola Peltz Beckham) are on the run from a militia controlled by the manipulative industrialist "Joyce" (Stanley Tucci). Quite why it needs to take 2¾ hours to get to the standard denouement is anyone's guess. Despite the inclusion of some Tyrannosaur-bots, the film has the same relentless predictability as the "Autobots" and "Decepticons" (if you can spot the difference) go through the same repetitively staged combat scenes before an ending that relies unduly on human intervention (oh yes, and lots of sentimentality too) before we essentially start back at square one with the usual "Optimus" monologue concluding the proceedings. This has the added benefit of a truly terrible perfo

<em>'Transformers: Age of Extinction'</em>... what the hell happened here?! I actually seriously enjoyed a movie from this franchise, I'm honestly flabbergasted. It's written, directed and produced by the same people, though I wouldn't have predicted that whilst watching. This, to me, felt almost entirely different to the preceding films in the series, despite the aforementioned. The opening 45-60 minutes are especially entertaining, it does wobble in that regard once or twice but when all is said and done I actually had a lot of fun with this! I was, for the first time, actually invested into not just the robots but also the human characters too. It's a new bunch on the latter side and, despite minimally liking Shia LaBeouf & friends, I found this lot to be a big upgrade - the change also made it feel fresh. Mark Wahlberg is great as lead, Stanley Tucci and T.J. Miller (for once) are pluses as well. Nicola Peltz and Jack Reynor are the weakest members of those onscreen, though even then I was still marginally interested in them. Kelsey Grammer, despite playing a fairly standard antagonist, is good, as is Li Bingbing in a relatively smaller role. Peter Cullen, John Goodman