With the approach of July 4th, Transformers: Age of Extinction makes sure to include an American Flag in almost every scene of the movie. At over two and a half hours, that’s a lot of stars and stripes. Much like the rest of the series, Transformers: Age of Extinction takes a long time to get going and hopes explosions and models who cannot act will distract you enough so that you realize there are no characters, no plot, and minor upgrades to special effects.
Shia Laboeuf is nowhere to be found a few years after the last Transformers movie. Since the events in Chicago, the CIA led by Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) has helped eliminate the remaining Decepticons and Autobots on the planet, but still cannot find Optimus Prime. The Autobot leader is discovered by Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), a failing inventor and father to a college bound daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz). Cade eventually gets sucked into Optimus’s war on three fronts between Decepticons alive and dead, as well as with the human created Transformers by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), who might as well call them iFormers. Cade is tested by Tessa as well; her new boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor) wants the guys blessing but Cade is very apprehensive. The conflicts take the group across the globe from Texas to Chicago to Beijing, destroying whatever is in their path.
The special effects are clearly front and center in Transformers: Age of Extinction. The CGI is very professional and clearly a lot of care was put into the various ways Tranformers can shapeshift. Slow motion is used to great effect in keeping the action coherent and displaying how cool CGI can be. Some of the new Transformers (specifically the Dinobots) look very impressive, and the scenes on a spaceship are very cool looking. Mark Wahlberg dutifully looks in awe at how cool his life has become. However, these effects feel hollow and aren’t glamorous enough to carry the entire film.
That is mostly because the script is condescendingly lazy. Characters are given one note to play. This is like a Hunger Games exercise, where the talent rises to the challenge (Stanley Tucci) and the weak threaten to ruin the story (Nikola Peltz). Even the Transformers only get one note, which gets worse since that note is usually “Asian” or “Urban.” Why is there a spaceship? Where did the Dinobots come from? Pointless questions. But the crème de la crème of sloth comes in the final act, set in Beijing, where repeatedly shots of the Willis Tower project in the background. Either the Chinese built an amazingly close replica of Chicago’s tallest building, or the editors didn’t see the need to easily remove it from the shot. Bay even resorts to mocking people who mock his films with his dialogue, giving Transformers: Age of Extinction a healthy dose of narcissism on top of the lengthy story’s stupidity.
I considered writing a really long piece about Tranformers: Age of Extinction, concluding that the review was a metaphor for how meandering the movie does. But I thought the better of it, and just will end this review saying you might be minorly impressed by the CGI, but you’ll mostly be upset you wasted over two and a half hours of your time. Transformers: Age of Extinction needs to make like its title and let better franchises attract fan boys.