One thing you can say for Michael Bay’s work: it’s consistent. Bay’s name on a film project guarantees a fast-paced story filled with explosions and visually arresting action happening almost too fast to track. So it’s no particular surprise that Transformers: The Last Knight — Bay’s fifth Transformers movie in 10 years — unapologetically offers more of the same. It’s a quintessential summer film: a big-budget romp requiring low brain activity. Even viewers who’ve never seen a Transformers movie before will kindly be handed everything they need to know in the first 20 minutes. Bay only asks that the audience shows up with enough fortitude to sit through Last Knight’s two-and-a-half hour runtime.
The franchise’s previous installment, 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, handed the story over to a new hero, Cade Yeager, played by everyman actor Mark Wahlberg. Cade is a wisecracking inventor (“patents are pending”) who has become a wanted man. To avoid capture by a group of commandos known as the T.R.F., he spends most of his time hanging out in a desolate junkyard and placing one-ended phone calls to his daughter simply to hear her voice. That gives him more time with his friends the Autobots, the transforming alien robots at the center of the long-running Transformers TV, comics, games, and movies franchise. The Autobots are constantly at the mechanical throats of their brethren, the sinister Decepticons. The two groups fight for a variety of reasons, which usually boil down to the Autobots fighting to protect Earth, while the Decepticons would sooner see it destroyed. Meanwhile, in the continuity of Bay’s movies, humanity’s leaders have decided all Transformers are bad news, and should be attacked on sight.
This time around, Cade’s loyalty to the Autobots leads him to ownership of an alien artifact, a key to to an upcoming conflict. Soon, he’s teamed with history buff Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) and Oxford professor Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock), as they work to figure out why Transformers keep crashing on Earth.
The Last Knight is exploding at the seams with plotlines. It opens with a callback to King Arthur and his knights of the round table, and the dabbling of alcoholic wizard fraud Merlin. That’s the backbone for the film’s central conflict. Early on, the movie introduces a surrogate daughter for Cade — a scrappy little girl who’s lost her family and has a preternatural knack for robot repair. Then it pushes her to the back seat when Viviane’s character starts to get real screentime. Viviane, like every other character in the film, is never short on wit, and has a key role to play… but she’s also predictably set up as a chemistry-light love interest for Cade, from the minute they’re onscreen together. Sir Burton acts as the plot’s shepherd, tying together its mythical past and its explosive present, but once his role is fulfilled, his character is shuffled offscreen so unceremoniously that it’s laughable, in the most painful sense.