TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (2014)
Tagline: Prepare for extinction.
(Action, Sci-Fi, Wait Is That Bingbing Li?) [PG-13]
The blast wave will incinerate that city into molten metal. He'll have enough to build a massive army, and annihilate your species forever.
This one takes place a few years after the battle of Chicago where Autobots and Decepticons, where Sam Witwicky, Carly, and former members of NEST along with the Autobots were able to save humanity. Unfortunately, Optimus Prime was also inadvertently the cause of the problem so even the Autobots are starting to get hunted down, and human and Autobot task forces are shut down. Now CIA agent Harold Attinger has gathered his asset and other resources to hunt all Transformers down. Meanwhile, Cade Yeager discovers an old truck in a rundown movie theater that turns out to be Optimus Prime in hiding. It doesn’t take long before Yeager and his daughter Tessa are being hunted down. After a drone he damaged Yeager (an inventor) finds that the people hunting him down are at least linked to a giant corporation run by Joshua Joyce. Joyce believes he is saving the world by creating an army of Transformers from the remains of Megatron’s brain. Little does he know, that he doesn’t have control of any of it.
Okay, for me this was by far the coolest “looking” Transformers movie made. I will say that with the Chicago battle and Shockwave, the battle of Chicago did feel bigger in scale, but this thing it out of control when it comes to design in a lot of ways. Galvatron’s look is a vast improvement over the cartoons as are all of the Dinobot designs. In TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN we found out that being an Autobot or Decepticon is a choice, but we hadn’t really seen any rogue agents until Lockdown (a robotic space bounty hunter) shows up and the fact that he’s collecting “alien” trophies for a bounty tells us that this universe is expanding rapidly. Admittedly Lockdown and several of the “manufactured” Transformers don’t really look all that unique, but they do all look pretty cool.
Out of the first 4 Transformers movies, this was the one where people seemed to kind of lose it in their assessment of whether or not Michael Bay should have agreed to continue with the series. That wasn’t because it sucked the box office though. In fact, this movie was the second most successful film in the entire series. I think it largely had to do with changing the main cast and dealing with a “post-Megatron” script.
Acting-wise, Mark Wahlberg (who I have grown to like more and more over time) takes on the lead male role as Cade Yeager. Shia LaBeouf left the series largely due to feeling Sam’s story arch had run its course and there wasn’t a reason to bring him back. He also felt the series overall was “irrelevant”, but whatever, I was kind of glad to see him gone, because that meant he was going to stop yelling at Bumblebee every 15 minutes. This is not to say he wasn’t good in the role, but I liked Wahlberg (UNCHARTED) better. The leading lady so to speak is Nicola Peltz Beckham who plays Tessa. She was decent, but I would say overall it felt like we were just getting a younger version of Carly from the last movie and without the cool accent. Outside of being poor and the daughter of Cade, there really wasn’t a strong reason for her to be in this other than trying to find someone to kind of fit in the “Carly” or “Mikaela” role. Stanley Tucci (THE KING’S MAN) is solid in this as Joshua Joyce, the a-hole with a soul. Kelsey Grammer was convincing as Harold Attinger. Jack Reynor (KIN) felt very “stock” as Tessa’s love interest Shane and finally, we get Bingbing Li one of my favorite actresses as Su Yueming. She doesn’t get to shine in this like she does in THE MEG for instance, but she does have a few scenes where she’s kicking dudes around like rag dolls and that is never un-awesome.
Overall this one was the best of the first 5 Transformers films so in spite of a few outrageous plot lines I am going to give it a 7 out of 7. The new Autobots they introduced were pretty epic and seeing Dinobots brought to life like that was pretty much hugging the nostalgia in my soul. I do kind of wish they had talked.
GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.
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