![]() The high-tech federal agents who track a nondescript sedan through the crowded streets of Hong Kong by satellite nonetheless lose track of Optimus the Transformer Truck on the empty roads of rural Texas. Noble everyman Cade infiltrates top-secret labs and interstellar dreadnoughts alike with casual ease. (These are known in the broader Transformers canon as “Dinobots,” though the film-no doubt recognizing just how silly that sounds-refers to them simply as “legendary knights.”) There is also, inevitably, a storyline involving the return of the presumed-dead Megatron, although there are so many villains on offer this time around that he tends to get lost in the shuffle.Īs with previous installments of the franchise, Transformers: Age of Extinction misses very few opportunities to be dumber than it has any need to be. This narrative development, remarkably, is almost entirely unrelated to the appearance in the latter part of the film of a herd of Transformers that turn into, yes, robot dinosaurs. There is once again an all-powerful MacGuffin to be found, this time called “the Seed”-a sort of bomb the likes of which, we learn early in the movie, were used to wipe out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I could try to unravel some more of the plot here, but it is, as always, almost entirely beside the point. As with previous installments of the franchise, " Age of Extinction" misses very few opportunities to be dumber than it has any need to be. So Cade, Tessa, Shane, and Optimus hit the road together, with Lockdown and the CIA in hot pursuit. Luckily, Tessa’s secret boyfriend, Shane (Jack Reynor), shows up and it just so happens that he’s a professional rally-car driver. It’s not long before this sundry assortment of bad guys catches wind of Optimus’s presence at the Yeager homestead and paramilitary agents descend, threatening to put a bullet in Tessa’s head if her father does not cooperate with them. The villainous head of the unit (Kelsey Grammer) is in cahoots with both an intergalactic mercenary Transformer named Lockdown and a billionaire industrialist (Stanley Tucci) shopping for parts to build his own Transformers. government has severed its alliance with the Autobots worse, a rogue unit within the CIA classily dubbed “Cemetery Wind” has been targeting them for assassination. Since the trashing of Chicago in the last movie, the U.S. (The fact that it takes Cade a good while to figure out that this is no ordinary semi may help explain why he is not a more successful inventor.) (Why a movie theater? So the film can congratulate itself for self-knowledge with a characteristically lame joke about how cinema has collapsed into “sequels and remakes, all that crap.”) The truck is, of course, chief Autobot Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), sorely wounded after a skirmish. Miller) discover a dilapidated old semi in an abandoned movie theater and decide to bring it back to the barn. One day, Cade and his friend/employee Lucas (T.J. Cade lives with his 17-year-old daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz), on a farm in Paris, Texas, that is perpetually on the verge of being seized by creditors. This time out, the feisty-yet-innocent (human) hero is Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), a single dad and the unsuccessful inventor of such ill-conceived contraptions as the “Butler Bot,” a souped-up charcoal smoker that utterly fails in its appointed task of delivering beers to Barcaloungers. If it truly takes this long to save the world from the depredations of robots that turn into muscle cars, it may be that the world is no longer worth saving. A long, long run, in fact, clocking in at nearly three hours. But it’s fair to say that it gives its forbears a run for their money in both departments. And, no, it’s not quite as aggressively idiotic as the movie before that, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which may to this day stand as the clearest victory by screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman in their ongoing war against narrative coherence. So, no, Transformers: Age of Extinction is not quite as sour and unpleasant as its immediate predecessor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |