GIVE YOURSELF TO THE HELLISH EMBRACE OF “TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT”
Look, Transformers: The Last Knight is bad.
The good news, at least, is that it isn’t bad in the same kind of depleted, soggy way that the new Pirates of the Caribbean is bad, like everyone realized halfway through that they were making a turd and limped across the finish line accordingly. Nor is it bad in the way that, I don’t know, the new Alien is bad, where you shoot for the moon and end up with an admirable miss. No, this movie is gleefully, bombastically, aggressively bad. There is no bullet chamber unemptied, no explodable structure left un-exploded, no early-2000s gangsta lingo left unspoken by the robotic miscreants of title and no character developed; this movie is so balls-to-the-wall that the only sign of restraint is that there are no actual balls in it, which, oddly enough, you can’t say of some of the other, less bad Transformers movies. It is swolled-up, testosterone-fueled, smash-your-head-against-a-brick-wall bad, and for that, it is almost kind of ... good?
This is a remarkable five movies into the franchise, which, you might remember, actually started with a pretty good Spielbergian riff on a boy and his car back in 2007. Since then, Michael Bay, who has been directing these movies since what feels like the dawn of the nickelodeon, has piled on the bullshit to a staggering degree, eschewing even the bare minimum of logic something like this requires in favor of the most bonkers, Mad-Lib style plot that can possibly be thought up. Part 2 incorporated the pyramids. (Which, incidentally, get obliterated here.) Part 3 had the moon. (Ditto.) Part 4 had robot dinosaurs. (They're back for a hot minute and make it out unscathed.) This one loops in the Knights of the damn Round Table, whose battle against the Saxons was aided and abetted by a soused Merlin (Stanley Tucci, very funny) and a cadre of Transformers back in what a chyron helpfully informs us as “England -- The Dark Ages.”
Basically, Merlin’s staff is the MacGuffin of the day, and it’s the only thing that can save us from an imminent collision between Earth and the Transformers’ home planet, a world-ending event led by an evil robot witch and a heel-turned Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), who blasted off into space at the end of Part 4.
And listen. I could pick this shit apart all day if I wanted to. I could tell you that I distinctly remember the Transformer planet getting blown up two movies ago and Bumblebee getting his voice back four movies ago, or that it’s absurd that there are a bunch of baby robot dinosaurs roaming around and nobody seems to have any idea as to why. I could tell you that Cade Yeager is still a ridiculous, ridiculous name (all apologies to the actual Cade Yeagers out there); that Laura Haddock probably deserves better than to be Bay’s screen siren du jour and fill the estimable shoes of Megan Fox (who, you’ll remember, quit the franchise), Rosie Huntington-Whitely (who, you might remember, was actually pretty good in replacing Fox) and ... *looks up Age of Extinction on IMDB* Nicola Peltz, who I clearly didn’t remember was in these movies at all. I could tell you that Bay’s persistence for weird, 7th-grade level sex humor is just that -- weird -- and that Austin Powers did the inevitable “it’s so huge!” gag a lot better, both times. I could tell you that the best thing you can say about Jerrod Carmichael’s appearance in this movie is that he doesn’t get killed like T.J. Miler did. I could tell you that five -- five! -- movies in, nobody has yet been able to assemble a logical conversation between a human actor and the Transformers, who speak in non-sequiturs so random it’s like someone pulled a cord on their back. I could tell you that the action is incoherent even by the standards of this franchise; existing only to showcase the formidable might of the United States military just in case any Russians are getting any funny ideas or whatever.
But you know what? I’m not gonna do that. Because about a third of the way into The Last Knight, which, coincidentally, is when the early charm of the movie wears off, you realize that this is not a movie you critique. It is not a movie you judge. It is a movie you surrender to. And really, once you do that it actually isn’t that bad. Still aggressive, yes, but it becomes almost charming. Oh look, another car chase. Cool, they got John Turturro to come back. This kid with the scooter Transformer (Isabela Moner) is kinda good, hope she ends up being something. This last scene makes no sense but it is beautifully shot. Wow, Mark Wahlberg’s arms are big as hell, and hey, he actually has a fun little bit of chemistry with Laura Haddock.
And once you surrender, to be honest, there are a few genuine pleasures to be had. The dragon is cool. Little nuggets planted in the beginning pay off. There’s a funny joke about Cuba’s policy towards Transformers, and an even funnier one involving a swelling score during a major exposition scene that both reminds you Bay can be very entertainingly self-aware when he wants to, and mildly infuriates you that he never wants to often enough. Wahlberg commits to this stuff with a surprising amount of gusto, and Josh Duhamel is actually pretty good as a soldier from the original trilogy making his return to the narrative. And, of course, there’s this movie’s centerpiece: Anthony Hopkins as a doddering English lord with a maniacal robot butler named Cogman.
Sir Anthony has been cultivating paycheck roles like these over the last few years, but you seem to get the idea that he’s enjoying this one a lot more than, I don’t know, playing Odin in Thor. He’s long since tired of regality. He snits, he snorts, he curses out fussy British types and delivers this absurd exposition with a wink so profound the whole movie is elevated for a brief second wind once he appears. If anyone can steal his thunder it’s his French Lamborghini Transformer (Omar Sy, I shit you not) or the butler Cogman, but they know better than to try. The butler, however, does get the best lines after him, as well as one of the truest: (Spoilers incoming) After Sir Anthony meets his doom at the hand of the villainous Megatron, Cogman eulogizes him thusly: “Of all the Earls I have had the pleasure to serve, you were, by far, the coolest.” The lesson being, of course: Sir Anthony could have done something quote-unquote smarter with his time. He could have nitpicked the logic. He could have resisted the bullshit. But no. He surrendered to the world of Transformers, fired his weapon like a man, and became a damn hero as a result. We should all be so lucky.
