First the good news. Having helmed all five installments in the toy-based franchise, which he initiated back in 2007, mayhem-meister Michael Bay has called it quits on the Transformers.
The bad news: producers are still willing to bankroll the series, which has collectively raked in $ 4 billion.
Attributed to four writers, the utterly incomprehensible plot of The Last Knight revives the old fracas between nice CGI metal machines and their nasty counterparts. As in the previous iterations, the fate of Earth is at stake, not to mention the viewer’s eyes, ears and sanity.
Of course, a bunch of humans also get involved. They include King Arthur (the British monarch’s legacy is besmirched a second time following Guy Ritchie’s recent wretched biopic), Merlin the wizard and a fictitious new Prime Minister of the UK.
In present-day England, we also encounter an aristocratic historian (Anthony Hopkins in ‘take the money and run’ mode) and an Oxford scholar (Haddock).
Bay pummels the spectator with a barrage of blow ups, drone attacks and unrelenting pyrotechnics. At the end of a wearisome two-and-a-half hours, it’s evident that the battling bots need to be consigned to the heavy metal trash heap once and for all.