[Review] Transformers: The Last Knight

The opening scene of Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth installment of Michael Bay's exhaustingly crappy Transformers series, boasts a myriad of giant spiked fireballs raining down over a medieval battle, and one of the first lines of dialogue yelled is "This is what the end looks like!" And I couldn't help but think "This better be the end..."

With all the talk of Lancelot, Merlin, and magic, for a moment I wondered if I accidentally walked into a straggling matinee showing of the latest King Arthur film. But no, amidst all the swords and dragons and aliens, this is actually a Transformers movie, and Mark Walhberg is back to save the day (he must've requested extra shots of his triceps this time), and he's very much in the "Not all Transformers are bad" camp. Anthony Hopkins even shows up to prophesize the events.

It's as if Michael Bay set out to make the messiest and most bloated movie possible, and succeeded. It's like a kid tossed all their different action figures into a box together and Bay took it and decided to morph it into a plot. A very awful and incoherent one. This is a hodgepodge of dizzying, headache-inducing chaos. A stinky clunker of clashing CGI metal. An explosive cinematic fart that seems to be making things up as it goes along. There's also some painstakingly corny schmaltz that shows up about every 10 minutes. And did I mention that the runtime is almost three hours long?

This thing is also riddled with uncomfortably forced and cringeworthy dialogue that sounds like it was written by an asshole. But a couple of the lines are hilarious, whether intentional or not, like when Josh Duhamel orders Mark Walhberg to drop his gun, and Wahlberg says "I'm not dropping shit." Either way, there was a lot of shit dropped throughout this movie.

( 2/10 )

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