Rated PG-13 | 149 mins.
Directed by Michael Bay
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Hopkins
Surprise! Optimus Prime isn't dead! What's not a surprise? It's another abysmal movie in the Transformers franchise. Obviously, it should've all ended after the very first Transformers movie, which was actually good, but they only keep making these movies because it's a huge cash cow. All of the Transformers movies have grossed over $4.3 billion worldwide and will still continue to amass a ridiculous amount of money pretty much until Michael Bay announces his retirement.
The fifth move in this universe is a hot mess that not even Anthony Hopkins or Stanley Tucci could save it. They introduce magic and Merlin to the world of Transformers and it's so out of touch with the first film that it shouldn't even be associated anymore. The evil Quintessa takes control of of a damaged Cybertron that she wants to rebuild for herself and uses Optimus Prime to do all the dirty work. It was so long and so boring and so hard to watch. Cade (Mark Wahlberg) hides his pet robots in a junkyard, which isn't as incognito as he'd had hoped. He also (basically) adopts an orphan, Izabella (Isabella Moner), whose only robot friend is killed. She cries and yells at Cade a lot and was kind of an unnecessary character to the film. Then they add a new, random love interest for Cade, Viviane (Laura Haddock), who wears dresses that are too tight for a professor of English Literature at Oxford. Of course she's the key to everything because she didn't know she was a descendant of Merlin.
Not everything about this film is bad. It had its highlights. There's no doubt that the CGI and sound mixing/editing were on point and maybe one or two fight scenes were cool. It also helped that Hopkins' robot butler, Cogman, was there for comic relief. Other than that, it definitely was a shit-show. It all ends with a setup for the sixth film, which is slated for a 2019 release date. Transformers Universe: Bumblebee, however, will be released in the summer of 2018 and since he's a fan favorite, hopefully the movie is at least decent. ★
★★★★ Classic | ★★★½ Excellent | ★★ Fair | ★ Poor