turuu_tiger
Despite making a marvel of a film which is visually such a spectacular mammoth, the film's story is nearly paper thin and spills out straight from the good versus evil bottle. Sadly, I was expecting more on the story front. Echoing the sentiment that the world has had enough of Autobots, the film kicks off with the auto bots being hunted down. A broke Texan engineer, Cade Yeager is the one who lands up in trouble after he buys a broken truck which he intends to dismantle and sell off to fund his daughter Tessa's college education. My only problem with this film is its story which affects the action bits too! The drill was that the humans kept getting caught and kept getting out of it. The too-much-excitement becomes a staple after a point, when you tend to become unfeeling about it. The Hong Kong based climax probably appeases the fans of the franchise in the region, but is in my opinion a slack ending of sorts.
fstammen
So after the previous Transformer movies we could expect the worst here but for some reason we got sucked in again. This time because of the promise of Dinobots, and be honest, who doesn't think the Dinobots are cool?! What a disappointment this whole movie became! The story is very unbelievable and although there are metallic robotic dino's, they were just dino's and not saying "Me Grimlock". It becomes very obvious this is all product placement and pandering up to audiences in China. And worse, a large portion of the movie us a discussion about underage sex and trying to normalize it. Why? We want to see an action movie with dinorobot's and not some sexual fantasies from the director. Also the end is completely unbelievable: the evil robot owns Optimus and the other Autobots but then 3 humans step in and kick the robot's ass. I mean come on, I understand they need to shoehorn humans in but like this? No way! This is one of the few movies I played with my smartphone for a long time because I was bored out of my mind so avoid this one!
benson3436
These movies have gone done hill drastically since the departures of Shia and Fox. At least Turtorro is still here! Don't get me wrong, I love giant fighting robots as much as the next guy, but these plots suck and the characters are boring. Mr Walhberg is a fine actor, but he never should have been cast for the main role in these movies.
MaximumMadness
I'm going to be perfectly upfront in admitting that I actually really enjoyed Michael Bay's first entry in the "Transformers" saga upon initial release in 2007, and I still maintain that it's a solid and entertaining work. It's not a great film by any means, but it's got a certain charm to its humor and it's wildly thrilling thanks to Bay's trademark kinetic visuals and ferocious editing. It's a perfect Summer popcorn film, full of eye-popping effects that still hold up and some charming performances from the cast.Then there were the sequels. Oh, boy. I will with some shame cop to the fact that I was one of the few defenders of the second entry in the series ("Revenge of the Fallen"), though in retrospect I've come to realize the movie to be nothing more than a woefully pale imitation of what came before- only bigger, louder and a great deal dumber. This was further compounded by the third go- around ("Dark of the Moon") which thankfully cut back on the stupidity of that second film... but still wasn't able to stand on its own thanks to its own plethora of issues with the troublesome cast (replacing series co-star Megan Fox with a vapid Victoria's Secret model being particularly mind-numbing) and an over-bloated run-time. Needless to say, by the time the credits rolled on that third movie, I was pretty much done. And I ended up deciding that I was content with merely revisiting the first movie while ignoring everything that came after.But unfortunately for me, curiosity reared its ugly head, and I ended up popping on the fourth movie, "Transformers: Age of Extinction", about a year back for laughs. I figured with a few beers in me and a couple friends to joke around with, it might be worth checking out once. But, yeah... it's a complete and utter mess. A confused, bloated, boring and shockingly hard-to-follow dumpster fire of a film. And it sadly signals the biggest step-down in quality of the franchise thus-far. Trading in those belly-laughs and genuine gasps of excitement that the 2007 film specialized in... and instead delivering consistent groans of disbelief and annoyance.The film has no coherent plot to speak up, and instead is comprised of a writhing mass of tenuously connected "story-lines" that don't really mesh together all that well. I watched the film... I really did. And I can't remember a darned thing about it outside of the brain- destroying action and obnoxiously loud sound effects. It's something about how the Transformers are all being hunted down, and Optimus Prime ends up becoming entangled with a single father played by Mark Whalberg? And at the same time, some weird tech-genius CEO is "cloning" Transformers for military application? And there's this weird Transformer Bounty Hunter who is somehow in league with the military despite the military supposedly hunting down the Transformers? And somewhere in there, there's Dino-Bots and a random Doomsday- Weapon peppered in? And the opening implies that the Transformers have been around even longer than previously thought? And about a million other things are going on as well? You'd need enough Ritalin to kill a horse in order to understand what's going on in this movie.But maybe you don't care about the plot or the characters, and you're just interesting in explosive action and crazy visual effects. After all, that's what these movies are all about, right? Well, even on that front, this film feels bizarrely underwhelming, and it's just kind of dull and monotonous. Not only have the computer-generated effects not improved since the third film- they look like they've taken a step back, and objectively look even worse than they did in the first movie somehow. The Transformers have that weird plastic-y look to them that comes with bad rendering, and the animation is way too smooth, making them look more akin to Looney Tunes than real-life robots in disguise. I was half expecting Optimus to dig himself to Albuquerque by the time the film ended... And the action is so overdone that it loses all impact. The first film was so clever in how it built up to its explosive climax. This one just basically throws everything at the lens possible as often as it can, and it completely desensitizes the audience. You can't go so excessive so often, or else it loses meaning.And don't even get me started on the downright creepy and unsettling "Romeo and Juliet Law" subplot the film likes to throw in your face constantly. Yeah, the film has several scenes dedicated to the fact that the protagonist's 17-year-old daughter is dating a 20-year-old after they met in High School. OK, whatever, it happens I guess. But the movie doesn't just let it go... it reminds us of this fact way too often and goes into long-winded spiels about how it's "totally legal", and it becomes really unsettling really quickly. It feels less like the movie trying to set up conflict... and more like Michael Bay trying to explain why he thinks it's OK to objectify young women. It's really gross how much the film is obsessed with this minute plot- point.If there's one thing I can say to the film's credit, it's that Whalberg is a very likable and charismatic actor, and he's a good replacement for previous star Shia LaBeouf. And yeah, you do still care about the returning Autobots, simply because we've come to enjoy them after three previous films. But that's really all the film has going for it... The rest of the film is just a messy re-skin of what came before, but made way more convoluted and pointless by the needlessly excessive carnage, ridiculous script and creepy subtext. And for that, I give it a very poor 3 out of 10. Just stick with the first movie, folks. That's the only one that matters.
