Live Action Transformers Movies Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank franchises or filmographies from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week in honor of the release of "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts", I'm ranking all 6 Live-Action Transformers movies. 

6.Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014):

Age of Extinction is such an exhausting, overlong and painfully stupid movie that by the time some cool shit actually happens (dino Transformers show up), I was too beaten down by what came before it to actually care.

Grade: D+ 

5.Transformers: The Last Knight (2017): 

The Last Knight has a completely incomprehensible plot and Michael Bay seems to have completely lost interest in making Transformers movies by the time the second half of this 2.5+ hour affair rolls around, but seeing Anthony Hopkins fully commit to playing a weird little man who has been entrusted to be the secretive head of all Autobot/Human relations, Jerrod Carmichael take over the bit comedic relief character role from T.J Miller and an insane opening scene where the Autobots fight alongside King Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot make it slightly better than Age of Extinction.

Grade: D+

4.Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009):

Is Revenge of the Fallen the clear worst entry of the Shia LaBeouf-era Transformers films? Easily. The story centered around LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky getting robot symbols embedded into his brain after touching a shard of the AllSpark Cube-which indirectly makes him the key for the Deceptions to find a device that will harvest Earth's energy to blow up the Sun in order to re-build their home of Cybertron is an unintentionally funny mess and the bursts of racism, sexism and weird, pervy shit that routinely makes its way onto the screen will forever live in infamy. With all that being said, it never even sniffs the dumpster that both Mark Wahlberg-led entries were bred in-mostly because Michael Bay keeps the energy level high and the action sequences manage to pop more than they did in the original.        

Grade: C

3.Transformers (2007):

When I was 15, this was literally one of my favorite movies. 16 years later, I barely still have a positive opinion about it. There's far too time much spent on establishing the bland backstory of Sam Witwicky's grandfather accidentally making contact with the frozen corpse of Megatron in the 1930's and exploring the US military fallout of discovering there's an alien robotic race roaming the Earth and not nearly enough watching said robots fight each others. The final act is solid, the effects have held up great and the scene where the Autobots are trying (and failing) to hide outside of the Witwicky family home is legitimately very funny, but other than that, it's kind of just stuck in neutral.  

Grade: B-

2.Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011):

For as painfully flawed as Transformers: Dark of the Moon is (the less said about the plot, the performances of Rosie Huntington-Whitley and Patrick Dempsey and the bathroom scene with Ken Jeong and LaBeouf the better), the 45-minute final battle in downtown Chicago is by far the biggest, baddest action spectacle that the live-action Transformers delivered thus far. If Bay had delivered dazzling, show-stopping setpieces like this more often, these movies could've been way more fun. 

Grade: B-

1.Bumblebee (2018):

 A change in tone, stakes and approach was desperately needed after 5 not-so-great entries from Bay. Bumblebee understood what was being asked of it and director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) and writer Christina Hodson (Birds of Prey) delivered the goods. Turning a story of Optimus Prime's top lieutenant Bumblebee's early days on Earth after he loses his voice in a battle with Decepticons into an E.T.-esque story about him forming a bond with a young woman (Hailee Stenfield) whose become distant after her father passed away is an inspired reinvention that is full of heart, laughs and sincere odes to 80's cheese. It would've been a home run if the action beats lived up to the standard Bay set with his movies, but it's still a great little movie and the clear standout of the live-action Transformers franchise to date.  

Grade: B+