Transformers: The Last Knight is a bad film. I knew that from the outset having seen a couple of the other Transformers films (I keep popping back to the franchise for some cinematic sadomasochistic reason). The main flaw in this Michael Bay directed actioner is that its inherently stupid (it is based on a toy line after all), but you can’t but help admire the style in which Bay pulls it all together. Nobody else would have the cojones to offer-up a King Arthur subplot for a fifth film in a science fiction franchise – something not previously mentioned in other instalments.
Bay delivers a lot of bang for your buck, the aforementioned prologue plays like the opening of Gladiator, while a jaunt to modern day England is like Bay’s homage to The DaVinci Code. You can’t say that The Last Knight is devoid of ideas, in fact it has too many crammed into a ridiculously unnecessary 2 1/2 hour running time. You also get loud car chases, loud robot action and loud…in fact everything is just loud! If you want something to test-out your subwoofer, then this is the movie.
Mark Wahlberg offers value for money as the everyman caught-up in the robo-destruction, Anthony Hopkins appears as a quirky professor/Transformers historian(!) while Laura Haddock keeps-up the franchise totty quota. Also crammed into the film are franchise stalwarts Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci and John Turturro.
I didn’t like Transformers: The Last Knight, but I can aprectaie the skill that was used in bringing it to the screen. It’s just a shame that all that energy wasn’t used to make something better.
Special Features
Transformers: The Last Knight comes with an entire disc filled with bonus material, which clocks in at 90 minutes spread across 6 featurettes . This disc is more enjoyable than the actual movie and you get to see how they developed the ‘story’ created the action sequences and brought the whole thing together. Pretty great stuff considering how bad the movie is.
