The Transformers have returned for a fourth outing, to please the fans and spite the critics in Transformers: Age of Extinction. And where do I stand on this debate?
Preferably as far away from this film as possible. The story takes place in the years following the climax of the previous film, in which Chicago was devastated by the battle between two warring factions of robots. Since then, the FBI has all but hunted the Autobots (the good guys) to extinction. Enter Texas, USA (the movie is actually that geographically specific), where aspiring inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) has begun reparations on the truck form of none other than Optimus Prime, the weary leader of the Autobots. This draws the attention of the CIA, who have actually managed to synthesize the alien metal that the Transformers are made of (cleverly called...wait for it..."transformium"), and can now make their own Transformers. What could possibly go wrong? From there, the plot is more or less Yeager and co. going on the run from the CIA while Optimus and the generic, annoying, one liner-spewing Autobots (one of them actually voiced by John Goodman) do explosive battle with the government-issued Knock-Off-Bots. I have to give credit where credit is due: the setup for this film's plot is something new and draws heavily from the excellent District 9. Wahlberg isn't half bad either, whose wacky inventor mannerisms charmingly resemble the Rick Moranis' role in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. When he claims that he's going to fix the hunkered-down Prime with "spark plugs and a screwdriver," his charm is just enough for him to get by on the absurd line. In contrast, Nicola Peltz plays Yeager's rebellious daughter, Tessa, in an absolutely insufferable performance. She does very little, save for being an object for Wahlberg to pursue to justify his involvement with the Transformers. While Megan Fox may catch a lot of hate for her lackluster acting in the first two films, she at least wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty. But the plot just drops once the characters are introduced to make way for action sequences that are so overused, that they become boring. If you see too much of something, after a while, it loses its value, and the same applies to action. How does an explosion become boring? Repetition. By the time Dinobots (giant robot dinosaurs that by all means should be awesome) show up, I was just exhausted. Overall, I wanted to like this new film, but it felt like every aspect was half-attempted: the acting is generally weak, the plot fizzles out halfway through, and the action just bleeds into one big, ugly mess. What started as a cheesy but fun throwback film to the 1980s cartoon has devolved into an uninspired, full-frontal assault on the senses, and the worst of the Transformers films.
0 Comments
|
|