Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, Izabella Moner
Directed by: Michael Bay
Rating: *** ½(3 a half stars)
Welcome to the age of rage.
The war between constantly-transmuting machines and human beings that started in the first Transformer film ten years ago has now reached a point of no return….Or a point of illimitable returns, if you look at the collections of the latest film which are impressive in spite of the savage worldwide reviews .
And what exactly are the critics so offended by? Transformers: The Last Knight breaks none of the rules that director Michael Bay had set in the first film of the in 2007. Bay adds renewed vigor in the battle between Man and Machine as he takes the story back by many centuries to give us a direct link between the outerspace invasion by the machines and Merlin , the inebriated magician in 484 AD.
Here I must mention that I found the legendary Stanley Tucci’s magician far more entertaining that Shah Rukh Khan’s Goga Pasha in Tubelight. Tucci plays Merlin as a tipsy mischiveous over-aged brat with a sense of propriety hanging out of his slurring tongue even when civilization is threatened with extinction.
Director Michael Bay has a great sense of fun underlining even his most grim apocalyptic thesis on the ruination of civilization. Here in the fifth Transformers he is on sturdy ground, enabling him to create visual splendor on a scale that’s both awesome and believable.The relentlessly sweaty narrative is occasionally let down by actors who don’t get the joke, who play their characters far too seriously. For example the little girl Isabela Moner who plays the very important character of the under-age drifter who befriends the Transformers and wages her own battle against their extinction.
Not the young girl’s fault, but she just doesn’t get the point. She struggles to convey gravitas where giggles are the order of the (Michael) Bay.I couldn’t help remembering the little girl in Logan and her resilient and powerful rapport with Hugh Jackman. Here in Transformers Mark Wahlberg keeps saying the the girl is “family” .
We just have to take his word for it.
Not that the franchise takes a beating for the want of intrinsic credibility. Transformers The Last Knight moves at a rapidfire speed generating mayhem from the brittle life forces of a virtual reality . The transmutant special effects are bigger larger more vibrant and vitiating that ever before. Michael Bay’s forte is spectacle. He clogs the screen with a retinue of remarkable visuals , some so awe-inspiring they leave you wondering how on earth(and other planets) can such cinematic splendor of such interplanetary proportions be achieved .
If you are looking for the human touch as ceaselessly altering machines invade earth, there is plenty of that happening with great actors like Anthony Hopkins and John Turturro pitching in with their muted might to create a world where , as men and machine compete hard to be mean they generate a kind of unrehearsed humour and warmth that comes to a Big Screen Spectacle only when the director is sure he has nothing to prove any more in the given franchise.
Adroitly assembled , sinewy and savage, supple and funny,The Transformers in its latest avatar is far more impressive than you expect it to be.
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