Saturday, July 12, 2014

Movie Review: "Transformers: Age of Extinction" (2014)

Movie"Transformers: Age of Extinction"
Director: Michael Bay
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hours, 45 minutes
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In an effort to rid the world of all aliens, CIA Black Ops have severed their relationship with the Autobots and are hunting down and murdering any remaining Transformers. Meanwhile, an inventor from Texas named Cade Yeager and his daughter Tessa are just trying to make ends meet and are drowning bills. Cade buys what he believes is a broken down truck that he can salvage for parts to send Tessa to college. This truck turns out to be Optimus Prime. This leads the CIA to his front door and puts him and his family in the middle of their war.

There are not one, not two, not even three Transformers movies directed by Michael Bay.
There are four.
FOUR.
One was enough...but FOUR???

Writing that makes our blood boil, not just as a movie reviewers, but as a human people with moral compasses.

This franchise epitomizes everything that is wrong with America. We will catalog this idea for you now.

First, it overindulges our (apparently inherent) want and need to blow stuff up. Big time. This is and has always been Michael Bay's signature move in film, but this also makes him a one-trick pony. If he made a movie about speaking French, or a movie about pineapples, or a movie about shellfish, there would still be a ratio of 8 explosions for every 1 shitty line spoken, and that's a lot of fucking explosions because his dialogue is terrible.

This also brings up our second point. This movie shows us through Bay's eyes that we as a great nation love excess. Everything about this movie drips excess! How much it cost to make, how much people paid to see it in theaters, the number of explosions, the ridiculous trove of fancy muscle cars, the product placements...oh, the product placements. The last 90 minutes of the movie we spent not only with asses that hurt like the dickens because this movie is entirely too fucking long, but it was also spent counting product placements. They make no bones about the fact that they are blatant because they are pretty hard to miss. Here are a few off the top of my head: Toyota, Samsung, Philips, Bud Lite, Oreo, Redbull (which got a nice spoken shout-out at the behest of one of the characters in the movie...I wonder how much they funded this douchebag's project when all was said and done), Beats by Dre (which was the main focus of one scene and so obviously a product integration), Goodyear, a shitload of Chinese milks and energy drinks and waters, Chevy...in fact, Chevy is so prominently featured that, if we hadn't just bought a car, we *might* have even considered purchasing one because OH NO THEY HAVE GOTTEN TO US, TOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even the amount of characters and villains in this sequel is excessive. Galvatron was one of the things we were most excited to see, but in the end, he's barely on screen long enough to make a dent. Plus, when he is featured, he's just a damn bitch. It feels like he was reluctantly added to this movie to catapult the fifth installment if there is one...OH, SHIT. Even the run time was extremely unreasonable. As we laid out above, this film is entirely too long. You could cut almost an hour and a half out of it and it would still be a pile of poop. On top of that, it is so poorly paced that you feel like 90% of it is just explosions...of wait, IT WAS!! Plus, the film changed locations many times for no real reason other than they could. This comes off as completely unnecessary just because they had the budget to do so. Why? EXCESS SELLS.

Beyond all of this, there were some other glaring missteps. First, Nicola Peltz is a terrible freaking actress, and we never once thought in our lives that we'd miss Megan Fox. Well, we did. Peltz is so whiny and so boring that our "basic bitch meter" (trademarked!!!) kept pinging at its highest level. In addition, the music throughout the movie seemed to be a mismatch to what was going on on-screen, especially during the final climax. It seemed rather downtrodden even though the Autobots were kicking some serious ass. And while we're on the subject of the 'bots, the new Transformers (such as Galvatron and his army of minions) transformed really dumbly. Pixels floating on the screen scrambling to make a 'bot? Are you freaking kidding us?? This strikes us as something they thought would be cool but ended up totally flopping. Also, there were some glaring racist undertones which may have been featured in the first 3 films (we saw Transformers 1 a looooong time ago, and I fell asleep during Transformers 2 when it came out on DVD). Well, this installment follows suit. Why do you need to call someone Lucky Charms just because they have an accent? Worst of all, this movie PROMISED Dinobots, and they were barely in it! What a waste of time!

Fortunately, there were a few things that saved this movie from being a total failure. The Dinobots, while they weren't in the movie very long, did look pretty cool. In fact, besides the few errors we talked about above, Bay really does employ people to do awesome special effects. Some of the battles and fights are pretty good and make for some fun, mindless popcorn scenes. If you can count this as a positive, some of the overly cheesy lines and scenes made us laugh, and even if we were doing so ironically, hey, a laugh is a laugh, right Michael Bay? Another plus for us was Mark Wahlberg. He is far more tolerable and likable than Shit LaDouche, even if he is playing a Texan with an unchanged, strangely natural Boston accent (like really, there was no effort to change this whatsoever).

All in all, it was what we expected: a grandiose ode to American excess under the guise of nostalgia. We will say this, though: if "Transformers 5" is 2 hours and 45 minutes or longer, you can count this as our last Transformers review.

One point to the Dinobots.
One point to the reference to "The Big Lebowski."
One point to Mark Wahlberg for not being Shia LaBeouf.

My Rating: 3/10
BigJ's Rating: 3/10
IMDB's Rating: 5.7/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 18%
Do we recommend this movie: AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE!!!

2 comments:

  1. I admit that I like it when things go boom, and Michael Bay always delivers on that. But a biotch worse than Megan Fox, minimal Dinobots, and obscene product placement?! No!!!! Even Mark Walburg can't save the movie for me (he's pretty to look at). If it happens to be free on Netflix and I can't sleep I may watch it, but I won't go out of my way so see it now. Thank you for saving me from wasting my money!

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    1. Mark Wahlberg is gorgeous, LOL! But this movie is definitely nothing to get excited about, unfortunately. I must admit, I was *slightly* excited from the trailer because of the Dinobots, but alas, they barely made a dent in the movie. We are happy to help you save your money! :)

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