Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

The kindest thing I can say about Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction is that it reminded me very much of the fireworks show I saw on the Fourth of July this year.  In both cases, I attended out of a mix of curiosity, a mild sense of obligation, and a persistent feeling in the back of my mind that I was going to be disappointed.  And in both cases, I got exactly what I expected.

For that reason, I feel less inclined to berate Transformers: Age of Extinction than my readers might be expecting.  I knew precisely what to expect, and my expectations were pretty low, allowing me to take the fourth Transformers film for what it really is:  the cinematic equivalent of a fireworks show, all bombast and no bravura.  So I won’t even do the usual plot summary, because the plot can be summarized almost exclusively by naming actors and shouting onomatopoeias in all capital letters.

Fortunately, some very talented actors – Mark Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammer, and Stanley Tucci among them – are cashing what ought to have been very easy paychecks, and they’re more than capable of engaging an audience just on ethos alone.  They’re reliable and stable performers, and to be perfectly honest they, together with the budget, are what separate this film from a straight-to-DVD release.  It’s not particularly innovative, remaining in a very real sense indistinguishable from the three films that preceded it.  All one should expect from a Transformers film at this point is a series of very big, very loud, and slightly dumb explosions – which this Transformers delivers, and how.

At two hours and forty-five minutes, however, it’s absurdly long, baggy and bloated.  The words “There are too many robots” should not be an issue with a Transformers film, and yet there are far too many characters who come and go for reasons that can only be described as “plot.”  There are at least five factions of Transformers in the film, most of which are devoid of personality (and the ones with characterizations are viciously broad caricatures, like the samurai Transformer voiced by Ken Watanabe and the gun-toting Transformer voiced by John Goodman).  Only some of them are visually interesting – especially the dinosaur Transformers – but there’s little need for them in a film that very much resembles its main characters – lifeless, bulky, and clunky.

Sidebar:  one of my biggest cinematic pet peeves is when a film doesn’t properly introduce characters, such that I forget or never learn character names.  I think I can name about three Transformers in a cast of dozens.

Characterization aside, Transformers: Age of Extinction is a brutally tone-deaf feature, likely hard of hearing as a result of the amplified volume from the first three films.  The film barely has two settings – loud and very loud – and the pacing is astonishingly uneven while still managing to remain perfectly predictable.  There seem to be two distinct plots going on here – the American government’s pursuit of the Autobots and one corporation’s attempt to make their own Transformers – and either one of them would have made a decent enough film.  But since they’re thrown together into a film that is far more interested in explosions than in ideas, they’re reduced to what Mark Kermode has called “the loudest common denominator.”  Now, I realize that asking for ideas in a Transformers movie is like asking for a soufflé in a McDonalds, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the barest pretense of an idea.

What’s more, the film manages to be staggering insensitive, throwing around racial stereotypes to make the cast of Deadwood blush (for example, every Asian character is a master of some form of martial arts).  More patently offensive, Transformers boasts a neverending slew of quintessentially leery camera angles from Bay in which young women in tight/short clothing bend over things in slow-motion while the camera practically salivates over their lithe bodies.  It’s an eyeroll of the highest order to begin with, because Bay seems to be one of the only filmmakers outside of pornography not to realize that it’s the 21^st century and we’re all trying to be a bit more enlightened than that, but what makes it worse is that the film attempts to lecture us about sexualizing young women while doing exactly that.  There’s a loathsome moment where Wahlberg asks his daughter to dress more conservatively, which almost sounds like Bay reprimanding himself, but the camera is actually poised behind actress Nicola Peltz while apparently attempting to film directly up the leg of her shorts.

Aside from the perverse leering, aside from the casual racism, aside from the problems of pacing and length, and aside from the thin characterizations, every once in a while Transformers: Age of Extinction does manage to be a little bit of fun.  There are a few decent eyeball kicks, and Stanley Tucci is a real treat as always (it’s just too bad the film doesn’t actually know what to do with him).  But it is ultimately as mindless and as ephemeral as a fireworks show, but a good deal louder and very nearly unbearably longer.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language and brief innuendo.”  There are more robots punching robots and exploding than you could possibly imagine, and the film is replete with sexual objectification of female characters in tight clothing and accompanying light misogyny (“She looks hot”).  There’s one particularly well-timed F-bomb from Tucci and several other profanities of the scatological variety.