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'Transformers: The Last Knight' a series way overstaying its welcome

Basically, The Last Knight is just as bad as you assume it would be — if you’re not a die-hard fan of the series, of course.   

Dylan Amirio (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, June 23, 2017

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'Transformers: The Last Knight' a series way overstaying its welcome Meet the leader: Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Last Knight. (Paramount Pictures/File)

W

elcome to yet another installment of Transformers: a series as seemingly immortal as Optimus Prime himself. No matter how much fire is thrown at them, they’re still alive and keep coming back.

In the fifth installment, titled Transformers: The Last Knight, Cybertron (the dead Transformer planet) attacks Earth under the command of some evil being who manages to brainwash the usually sharper Optimus Prime into helping in the destruction.

Underneath all that, a connection is made between human, medieval history and the Transformers. Being chased once more by the ever destructive Megatron and his Decepticons, it’s up to lead actor Mark Wahlberg and his band of Autobots to save the Earth from destruction… again.

Basically, The Last Knight is just as bad as you assume it would be — if you’re not a die-hard fan of the series, of course.   

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There’s more slow-motion explosions than humor in this film. All attempts at cracking jokes, be they from humans or non-humans, fall flat on their awkward faces.

But the screen belongs to the robots. Their action sequences are usually what makes Transformers films entertaining, and their attempts at funny lines tend to fare slightly better than the humans, who are usually the ones that make these films so unbearable to watch.

I don’t think there’s ever been a strong leading actress in any Transformers film. From the blankness of original star Megan Fox to the lifeless, uninteresting lamp post that replaced her in the second sequel, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Laura Haddock does not fare any better in this latest installment. The unfortunate thing about Transformers’ leading female characters is that the emphasis on their physical appearance tends to far out-weigh the character itself. That said, compared with the previous two iterations, Haddock is at least more tolerable to watch as an actress.

Into another battle: Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yaeger in the latest installment of the Transformers series.(Paramount Pictures/File)

There was once a weird few months in 2007 when original leading man Shia LaBeouf was considered the hottest man on the planet. His decision to live his life away from the Transformers series seems to have been a good one. Now Wahlberg bears the brunt of the vitriol, despite not necessarily deserving it.

One particular performance, that of young Isabela Moner, was better than the rest. Moner plays Izabella, a spunky, 14-year-old mechanical genius, however the character seems to become sidelined halfway through the film. She dominates the first half hour for sure, but afterwards the film heads in a decidedly downward direction.

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But maybe all the actors are simply victims of the series’ scriptwriters, who try so desperately to cram in jokes, seriousness and unnecessary dialogue, they end up creating one big convoluted mess. Anthony Hopkins’ genius is wasted terribly with such cringe-inducing lines as “You’d want to know don’t you, duuuude?”

Maybe director Michael Bay himself is to blame for giving more screen time to the hundreds of explosions than any human or robot character, or for his decision to give unnecessarily epic scores to scenes such as a polo game — an activity where excitement seems to be non-existent to mild at best.

The film was visually disorienting, but not in an artful way. Scenes tended to shift so quickly that the viewer might not realize the characters have already moved to another place.

It’s also pretty amusing to see how the Transformer story is woven further into human history. The scenes featuring medieval relics and the chase to desecrate them to locate an important object is kind of reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code. The placements are similar too!

The story sees a leading American man (Wahlberg), an intellectual woman who turns out to be the descendant of an ancient character (Haddock), and an old man who has the knowledge about the entire thing (Hopkins) search for a Holy Grail-like object. Merlin the magician might not be as significant in human history as Jesus Christ, but who knows, maybe there might be a connection between biblical history and the Transformers?

Is there an end in sight for this tired franchise? Probably not. The ending suggests there’s more to come. But where will the story go from here? Whatever the case, it’ll probably somehow feature another showdown between Megatron and Optimus Prime, and there’ll likely be more links made between Cybertron and Earth (or Unicron, as it was revealed to be named).

For the action-film-crazed Indonesian market, this latest installment might be an enjoyable but forgettable family outing at best.

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Transformers: The Last Knight

(Paramount Pictures, 149 minutes) 

Directed by Michael Bay

Screenplay by Art Macum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Hopkins

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