Susan Granger’s review of “Transformers: The Last Knight” (Paramount Pictures)
Admittedly, I’ve always been the oldest woman in the theater – but I do keep hoping that, somehow, this multi-billion dollar sci-fi franchise will redeem itself.
I had high hopes for this fifth installment, particularly when the prologue, set in the Middle Ages, showed King Arthur waiting for Merlin (Stanley Tucci) to help him to win a battle against the Saxons.
Despite the legendary Knights of the Round Table, it wasn’t Merlin’s magic that gave Arthur power. It was the intergalactic Transformers.
Apparently, they’ve been hanging around Earth for eons, going back to Stonehenge, even battling Nazis.
So much for the history lesson except, as astronomer Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) explains, Merlin was given a sacred “magical” staff which can still be controlled but only by his only living descendant, Viviane Wembley (Laura Haddock), a skeptical English Lit professor at Oxford University.
Switch to wisecracking mechanic/inventor Cade Yaeger (Mark Whalberg), who has been hiding in a forsaken junkyard with Jimmy (Jerrod Carmichael) and some heroic Autobots.
So it’s up to Cade, Viviane, and a 14 year-old orphan, Izabella (Isabel Moner), to find the artifact and thwart evil Decepticon Megatron (Frank Welker).
Of course, they do get a little help from their Autobot friends: Bumblebee (Erik Aadahl), Hound (John Goodman), Hot Rod (Omar Sy), Drift (Ken Watanabe) and Daytrader (Steve Buscemi).
There’s this new law: “Transformers are illegal, except in Cuba,” enforced by a special military agency, the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF), that’s hunting them down.
So where’s Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen)? Is he on his home planet of Cybertron? And why?
Clumsily patched together by three writers, six editors and director Michael Bay (“Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor”), it’s a tedious, two-and-a-half-hour jumble of characters and idiotic battles, filled with pyrotechnics.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Transformers: The Last Knight” is an explosion-filled, mind-numbing 3, a $250 million Hasbro Toy promotion.