Age of Extinction serves as a kind of reboot for the franchise by introducing an entirely new group of human characters. Taking the hero reigns from the bumbling teenager Sam Whitwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, a wildly unsuccessful inventor and single father. Yeager's life changes in a big way when he buys a banged-up truck that he hopes to strip for parts. Shockingly, it turns out that truck isn't a truck at all, it's Optimus Prime! Before long, a CIA agent who is also the leader of a anti-Transformer project (Kelsey Grammer) has his team chasing Yeager, his daughter (Nicola Peltz) and his daughter's boyfriend (Jack Reynor) all over the state of Texas and beyond to try and capture Optimus and the rest of the Autobots. Of course, that's not all the Yeager's and Autobots have to deal with in their travels. The plot thickens as the head of a major invention corporation (Stanley Tucci) is extracting material from dead Transformers (known as transformium) to build his own man-made Transformers. Of course, unbeknownst to him, the molecules of Megatron have been put into Galavatron, the star of his man-made Transformer fleet. With his new form, Megatron, plans to use the seed, a bomb made of transformium that would kill all of the humans in a given area, and allow Megatron to make more Decepticons to participate in his plan for world domination.
Age of Extinction fails so spectacularly that it's almost impressive. There has to be no way that a movie can have so many terrible performances, cringeworthy dialogue, absurd on-screen deaths and blatant product placement while still taking itself seriously right? I understand as well as anyone that the Transformers franchise is not trying to do anything but entertain the audience , but this film is just far too dumb and goes on for far too long (it's only 14 minutes shorter than The Wolf of Wall Street!) to provide any level of legitimate entertainment.
The unintentional comedy value and sheer stupidity of the dialogue in Age of Extinction has to be seen to truly be believed. (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) After T.J. Miller's character is killed off about 20-25 minutes into the film, just about every scene of the film contains some situation or line that caused me to laugh hysterically, and contemplate what the hell drugs the screenwriter was on when he thought these lines and scenarios could be taken seriously by anyone above the age of seven. Perfectly matching the ineptness of the script is the horrendous performances given by everyone involved. Mark Wahlberg is in full Happening mode rocking a confused expression and just generally looking like a dingus for the duration of the film. Wahlberg is the only actor in Hollywood with literally no middle ground in his work. He either nails the role perfectly or completely blows it and, Age of Extinction falls well into the latter category. While Wahlberg certainly underwhelms, he can at least take pride in the fact that his performance isn't nearly as terrible as the one his on-screen daughter Nicola Peltz gives. In a series that has previously boasted such lauded thespians as Megan Fox and Rosie Huntingtion-Whitley as its lead female protagonists, Peltz still manages to turn in the absolute worst female performance of the entire franchise. Peltz is about as uncharismatic, dull and obnoxious here as an actor can possibly be. How she managed to get another gig after the disaster otherwise known as The Last Airbender is beyond me and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she never got employed again outside of this franchise.
Age of Extinction can't even make up any ground in the action department. You go to a Transformers movie to watch giant robots smash the living shit out of each other, but Age of Exitinction can't even get that right. Age of Extinction not only features the least action of the entire franchise, it doesn't even have a single memorable moment. Each action sequence here is essentially a watered-down version of something that appeared in an earlier Transformers film. This series lives and dies by the quality of the action scenes and the ones in Age of Extinction are not even close to being up to snuff. Director Michael Bay is typically one of the business in staging massive action setpieces, so it's definitely a shock that action scenes here are so standard and forgettable. When something as cool in theory as Optimus Prime riding a fucking Dinobot fails to excite, you know something is seriously wrong with the movie. Age of Extinction soils the reputation of what was previously the benchmark for mindless fun summer entertainment. Unless a new writer and cast is brought in for the next installment, I'm done with the Transformers franchise.
1.5/5 Stars
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