Review of Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) by Dcedmonds — 13 Nov 2014

"Transformers: Age of Extinction" 10 Scale Rating: 3.5 (Bad) ...

The Good: The human cast is an improvement over the previous casts. While they were mostly in the way, they were at least mostly tolerable. The story, at least initially, wasn't bad. A black ops mission to kill all Transformers, while convincing the public/government that they are only hunting evil Decepticons, was promising. Kelsey Grammar was excellent as the film's human antagonist. When the Dinobots (finally) show up, it is a pretty amazing spectacle.

The Bad: First off, the film clocks in at just under THREE HOURS. That is three hours of bombastic Micheal Bay action and at around the 1:15 mark, the decent story falls apart and becomes silly. Revolving around a rare mineral called "Transformiam" (I kid you not), we watch as Bay re-creates the first three films with the same scenes, same action sequences, and same silly dialogue. I'll give him credit, the potty humor was gone ... but Bay couldn't help but interject a series of one-liners from every character's mouth regardless of the situation. As in the previous installments, the robot villains are mostly drones devoid of any sort of personality and the overwhelming majority of them are targets that seem to explode on contact. Also, as usual once again, the humans seem invincible and had no problem jumping into a battle involving anywhere from 3 to 20 robots leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. I can suspend belief to an extent, but our heroes survived crashes, long falls, explosions, shrapnel, repeated hails of bullets, and all out attacks from Decepticons. Give me a break. Moderately better than the last two Transformers films, the fourth installment is just as messy, boring, and disappointing as it's predecessors. Bay clearly does not care about the mythology or story behind the Autobots and Decepticons and is simply using the license to make a horrible robot/alien invasion film. Purists and fans of the source material will once again walk away shaking their heads.