Crash-Bang-Wallop
Director- Michael Bay
Running Time- 2 hours and 45 minutes
Certificate- 12
I found the first live action Transformers film, released in 2007, to be a reasonably okay Friday night popcorn flick. Robots punching other robots is pretty fun, and Megan Fox is always nice to look at. But the sequel was dire, and the third was not much better. So Michael Bay has returned for the fourth time, gone is Shia Lebouf and enters Mark Wahlberg. Shifting the focus onto a family dynamic. Which is actually one of the stronger points of the film, but old habits and an overly long running time are nearly unforgivable.
So the main plot goes like this:
After the devastation of Chicago in the last film, Aliens are seen as a threat, so the CIA create a unit for the purpose of hunting down the Autobots, with the help of a bounty hunter/Transformer called Lockdown. Struggling inventor Cade Yeager (Wahlberg) buys an old truck and brings it back to his farm, which happens to be the very tarnished Optimus Prime in-hiding. The CIA find out the location of Optimus Prime and send a team to investigate, Cade and his family escape only to then find out that with the help of government funding, left over Decepticons are being created to form an army for the purpose of protecting humanity.
The good stuff:
I liked Mark Wahlberg as the protagonist, his Character is sympathetic, the conflictive triangle of his daughter and newly introduced boyfriend does bring a level of humanity into the narrative, which the previous Transformers films did not have. At one point his character uses a Transformers gun, which is good because at least the protagonist plays an active role within the film, rather than just a helpless standby as the robots hit one another.
Stanley Tucci puts in a good comedic relief performance, in the supporting role of Joshua Joyce, the head of KSI, the organisation who are building the Decepticons.
Although predictable, the action scenes while bigger are certainly better this time round, it is clear to see who is hitting who this time, and some of the slow motion effects are pretty decent. The final battle in Hong Kong is carnage at its best, and then the heat turns up even more when the Dinobots turn up, even if their appearance is very contrived there is something wonderful in seeing them cause havoc.
Now the bad stuff:
Inane ogling of female characters, this was a big criticism of all the previous films. There is no problem with having extremely good looking women in a film where their purpose is wardrobe dressing (which is not true completely in this case) but making a point of it is very sexist. One example is when Wahlberg's character makes a note of his disappointment in his daughter's ever decreasing length of her tight trousers. At which point the camera lingers behind her legs, her bare thighs in full flesh to the leering audience.
While the action scenes are enjoyable at first, after a while the entertainment drains out of them because, to put it mildly, they go on forever. Which brings me to the running time, at a bum numbing two hours and forty five minutes long, a film of this kind quite simply doesn't need to be this long. Especially when it looks like it's going to end at one point, and doesn't.
So...
Age of Extinction is not as bad as I anticipated, and believe me I really had to push myself to go and see it. It is in no way a good film and despite all of its flaws, it is still reasonably entertaining, which is all that we should really ask for. Which is often overlooked by many professional critics.
If you can switch off half your brain there is something here to enjoy.
2.5/5
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