Film Review - Transformers Age of Extinction (2014)

Transformers Age of Extinction is the fourth film in this series but this time we get a new lead character Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) an inventor down on his luck trying to get his daughter through College but one day he finds an old abandoned truck for his workshop to work on in the hope of making some money but there is more to this truck than meets the eye.

I have to confess sitting on the Comfy Chair that I had some level of optimism going into this film primarily because I thought the addition of Wahlberg to the series replacing Screaming Shia LaBeouf might make it watchable and also the addition of Frank Welker as Galvatron as a potential villain and the hiring of William Goldenberg to edit the film (he'd done the editing for Argo) which had me hoping that he might just might stand up to Director Michael Bay in terms of the ridiculous length of these movies, was I to dream perchance to hope or was it just a fool's hope in the dead of night.

Well sad to say that this was merely a fool's hope as this becomes the film version of the song that never ends, it just goes on and on and on and it all goes BANG! CRASH! and BOOM! and no one walks out without a funny head.

But to be more serious now there are a few key problems with this film and I will now outline those in more detail:

- The first of these is that the storyline is so sparse that it earns no right whatsoever to be 165 minutes long, this could've easily been done in 90 minutes to 2 hours at the very most and I am most disappointed in Mr. Goldenberg here that he did not do a better job in trying to get the length down but given he has 2 other editors to work with Roger Barton and Paul Rubell both of whom have edited some of Bay's previous films he probably didn't have much hope at all which is very disappointing.

- The second is that the characters here are just not worth caring about very much at all, Wahlberg does his absolute best and is a massive improvement over LaBeouf but even he can't make it worthwhile watching, Kelsey Grammar and Stanley Tucci also don't fare much better and it just comes across as a real waste of two great actors and Peter Cullen as Optimus the one thing all of us Transformers fans care about the most in this series just grunts, growls and mouths meaningless dialogue.

I also have another objection here on that point and that is the treatment of Optimus in this particular film, the Optimus I remember would NEVER endanger humans with his actions and would always try to lead the fighting away from them as much as possible whereas here he just doesn't care about anyone and is more than happy to blow away half of Chicago and Hong Kong, I sat there feeling very mad about that and that feeling hasn't changed much either.

- The third and last problem I have with this film is my old bug bear of the villains, there are two villains here Galvatron as I mentioned and Lockdown, ah yes Lockdown he was in the new Transformers game Rise of the Dark Spark and like in that game he's a nothing no name of a villain who has little to nothing to do with the plot and could've easily been removed with a clever rewrite of the script which makes Galvatron the villain and gives us the Cullen/Welker showdown I've been wanting all throughout this series and have never gotten, hopefully next time around that will change but why kid myself, I know it won't.

And also the 3D here is just way too dark and although it wasn't the headache inducing world of pain I had been expecting it still wasn't a good experience and 2D is more than enough for this movie.

But lastly watching this film made me appreciate Bryan Singer's work on X-Men just so much more as that felt like a big blockbuster film with actual heart and characters at its core instead of mindless head banging drivel that leaves either dizzy or with a headache but I'll stop there.

So all in all my foolish optimism for Transformers Age of Extinction turned to be just that foolish but hey we all know this will be a huge hit and you'll all go and see the movie regardless of my thoughts so here's my score of 1 out of 5.