<Review by: Farzad Mistry>

Directed by Michael Bay. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel and Laura Haddock

Running time: 2 hours and 29 minutes

As someone who has grown up watching various versions of the Transformers TV shows, I was impressed with the look of the first Transformers live action movie. The action sequences were too fast paced and the story line was predictable but seeing these larger than life (quite literally) robots on screen made it all worth it.  Fast forward to today after several iterations and re-hashes of very similar stories it’s not really novel or cool anymore.

The Last Knight attempts to add a new dimension to the franchise by introducing historical connections between the Transformers and humans. Apparently they have been around on earth longer than we were lead to believe in the first film. It was a fun idea, unfortunately the story unfolds in such a patchy disorganised way that you’re just left puzzled by the stupidity.

The film tries to tell multiple stories which loosely tie together at the end but most are of secondary characters who could have just as easily been left out, they were that unimportant. A few new characters have been introduced for comedic effect but most come across as stupid and not really funny. It felt like they weren’t even trying to write original dialogue anymore, especially for Optimus Prime and the transformers. Let’s face it most fans want to see their favourite characters kicking butt and delivering cool one liners and macho speeches but we got none of that.  Prime spends most of the movie constantly reminding everyone that he is “Optimus Prime” (which makes him look like a bit of an angry diva) and delivering the saddest rehash of his usual macho speech to rally the troops at the end. Even his battles with Megatron are filled with the same nonsense about them being like brothers that we have heard in almost every movie before.

Prime is an infinitely cool character and a great fan favourite but he’s just seems getting angrier and cheesier in every successive film. It’s like the film makers are so formula driven that they can’t even see how silly their films are anymore. I really wish they would bring in some of the screen writers from the cartoons because even they have better plots and more meaningful dialogue. It’s pretty much the same deal for the human star cast except their dialogues are a bit less cheesy.

So is there anything worthwhile in this film? Not a lot, it is the typical transformer formula but a few sequences do look new and there is a lot of action. Just don’t expect too much of a story or great dialogue. Think of it as a collection of cool transformer fight scenes (some of which are new) and you might not hate it. Keep your expectations low and you may even have fun.