Best in the series, but still pretty bad
We start the movie off with failed inventor Cade Yager (Mark Wahlberg) facing eviction and looking for his next big break so he can put his daughter (Nicola Peltz) through college. They are unaware that Cade's newest acquisition of a beat up semi is actually Optimus Prime, and they have thrown themselves in between the war humans have declared on all of the transforming aliens. The leader of this war is one of the top people of the CIA Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) who has struck a deal with two different sources to insure his retirement is a wealthy end to his career. The first is a bounty hunter style Transformer said to give him something that his other partner who is the leader of a billion dollar industry Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) needs in return for the acquisition of Prime. The humans have killed many of the Transformers saying to the public that they are only killing remaining Decpticons when in reality they are dismantling all of them. This has infuriated Prime and he is about to give up on humanity all together.
So here is the thing, Michael Bay doesn't know how to do story line. We all know that he replaces story line with visual effects and that is his identifier. The story line here had some major potential. The humans killing off Autobots, the incidents of past battles destroying cities being the fuel that fills the human's rage fire. All very compelling stuff. Unfortunately (as with all Transformers movies) the human element absolutely kills any attention we were giving to the compelling story and visuals. I care more for Cade Yager than I ever cared for Sam Witwicky; but, I still don't want to look at humans trying to prove that they are useful in any way to the Autobots, it kills my buzz. This movie tries to do too many things at once. It tries to touch on the Optimus' failed back story from previous films, it tries to explain how the humans feel about the Transformers being on their planet, it tries to make us feel for the humans caught in the middle, it tries to throw in secret agenda after secret agenda, it tries to throw in redemption arcs. So many stories going on at once that even a good director would have a hard time telling all of them with no flaws. What really pisses me off about this movie isn't the story (since I already knew that it was going to be shit) it was the fact that Micheal Bay fucked up the one thing he was good at. Visuals.
When I say that he fucked up the visuals I of course mean that all of his budget went into making the Autobots look good. In this movie we are introduced to "human made Transformers" that transform in a different kind of way, by disassembling in to a bunch of tiny parts and then reassembling into something new. The process of this looks god awful, like you can tell where the visual is introduced into reality by seeing the border. It was the worst looking thing I have ever seen from Micheal Bay. It also made the movie hard to follow. When we are first introduced to these walking eyesores the Autobots can't lay a hand on them due to their aforementioned ability to disassemble into tiny pieces. This line makes it into the movie "I built these things to kick that fat robot's ass." Then when fifty of them are introduced to kill the Autobots later in the movie, we see them dropping like flies, going down with a single shot every time. I think they try to redeem themselves by having Bumblebee say "I hate cheap knock offs," but I wasn't sold and ultimately disappointed. Another bad part of the visuals is that there is a scene in the movie where a guy falls of the roof of a large building and it legitimately looks like he is falling into a green screen. Cheap, and unprofessional from someone who is supposed to be the best in industry at doing this.
The other thing that irritated me about the look of this movie comes in two parts. The fifty thousand different camera angles and the unrelenting slow motion scenes. This movie was THREE HOURS LONG and it could have shaved an extra twenty minutes off that time by just cutting the slow motion scenes in half. When you are putting a shot of Mark Wahlberg slamming his fist onto the pavement in slow motion you have gone too far with this. There is only one other thing I was trying to keep count of besides how many times the movie went into slow motion and that was the blatant product placement throughout every scene. How much do you think Budweiser paid Mark Wahlberg to crack open a Bud Light on a destroyed car and drink it? Do you think the paycheck Stanley Tucci got from Beats by Dre was the biggest thing he has seen in his career? The only thing more annoying than all of this was me, damn near getting whiplash from all of the different camera angles. We got first person, long shot, epic pose shot, falling shot, over the shoulder shot all with in one minute of each other.
The big question of all of this is: how did Mark Wahlberg do? Have you seen the movie "The Happening?" Think of that performance and now you know what he has done here. I don't blame Markie Mark for this since I know he can act (see "The Departed," "Four Brothers," even "Ted") I blame the director. I think he should never have held any amount of screen time with someone at Kelsey Grammer's caliber though, because Kelsey stole the entire show. Unfortunately, it is easy to stand out in a sea of shit. Staley Tucci wasn't bad, but he has done better. Nicola Peltz served as the new eye candy for this movie, and it was disappointing since her back story could have had her with a gun in her hand shooting robots instead of the standard damsel in distress. Her dad says that she was raised like a boy basically, taught to throw a perfect spiral, taught to weld, she could have been shooting a gun right along side him instead of cowering in the corner. I guess Micheal Bay had enough of pre-madonnas though (this failure is brought to you by Megan Fox). The absolute winner of worst performance of this year (probably the decade) is going to go Jack Reynor. He didn't know whether to be Irish or southern. He kept switching accents. He wasn't convincing at all. Overacting. Underacting. He was just awful, and I hope he never does a film like this again.
There are couple of closing thoughts I have to leave with. The only good parts of this movie were: the lack of Shia LeBeouf, Kelsey Grammer, and Optimus riding a transforming Tyrannosaurus Rex into battle. Other than that no to this entire movie. No to childish humor that doesn't resonate with any age group. No to the endless amounts of plot holes. No to Optimus Prime randomly finding a jetpack after a battle. No to blatant product placement. No to overused slow motion. No to shitty special effects. No. No. No. This movie hasn't quite killed this franchise for me since it was the best of the series, but it is another nail in the coffin. Too long and only appealing to the lowest common denominator, who seem to still care about the cars Transforming for the fourth god damn movie in a row. If you like this I envy your ability to like a movie that is this horrible and find nothing wrong.
Final Verdict: Pirate it The only thing that saved this from my worst rating was that it was better than the first three. I actually saw effort in the story line (failed effort but effort none the less), and that is at least something.
No comments:
Post a Comment