Transformers: Age of Extinction *** (2014, Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, T J Miller, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer) – Movie Review

Transformers 4 is an awesome but soul-less juggernaut of a stonking, barn-storming action thriller, cruelly dumping the nice original cast after 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction, and instead randomly employing today’s favourite action star Mark Wahlberg as widowed mechanic and inventor Cade Yeager, his father of sexy teenager Tessa (Nicola Peltz).

Robotics expert Cade buys an old truck and discovers it’s Optimus Prime. Then the father and daughter combo drag along the girl’s cute older boyfriend Shane Dyson (played by Jack Reynor), whom dad keeps saying is too old for his girl, and join the Autobots as they are targeted by a bounty hunter from another world.

It’s an incredibly long, relentless thrill ride, hardly stopping to provide room for acting, dialogue or characterisation in its search for spectacular entertainment. It keeps on and on piling on new action and new thrills, then more new action and more new thrills. You want it to stop after two hours, but it runs relentlessly on for another 45 minutes.

Thankfully, T J Miller provides a few laughs before his character exits. Stanley Tucci’s semi-villain Joshua Joyce, the CEO of a tech giant, starts a bit amusingly before his nagging character is driven into the ground, and doesn’t exit, though you hope to hell he will. Kelsey Grammer’s Mr Evil CIA agent, Harold Attinger, is a boring villain because Grammer is asked to play the character seriously when lots of moustache twiddling in needed.

That’s the main fault of the whole film. It’s no real fun and it’s never funny. Wahberg is great with the action, but he can also be a fine actor, which is never required here, and, again taking it all far too seriously, he can’t twinkle as an action star, like, for example, first choice Dwayne Johnson can.

Those looking for big robots, explosions, exotic locations and spectacular brain-in-neutral action – and folks into the Transformers lore – will be well satisfied. It’s all a whole load bigger, louder, longer and pacier than before. For the rest of us, there’s too much mind-numbing spectacle, too little humanity and too few laughs.

It was announced on 19 December 2014 that Mark Wahlberg will return for Transformers 5 and he is committed to ‘a couple more’. Paramount unceremoniously dumped the whole cast when they rebooted the franchise in 2014 with Transformers: Age of Extinction. That included Josh Duhamel as Lennox, but he is to make a surprising return for the fifth film, Transformers: The Last Knight. Michael Bay returns as director for the film, which is to be written by Iron Man writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, and Ken Nolan.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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