I’m not a fan of the three Transformers films I’d already seen so please bear in mind that I
went to see this purely out of boredom and with low expectations. I had decided on a trip to the pictures and
the only other alternative available to me at the time was the new Pirates Of The Caribbean. Disclaimer
aside, I can now get on with telling you how utterly appalling The Last Knight really is.
There’s a scene in the ‘Imaginationland’ episode of South Park where the military call on
film directors for ideas on how to resolve a crisis. Michael Bay comes in and describes an endless
stream of explosions before being stopped and told “they aren’t ideas, they’re
special effects.” Bay responded by
saying that he didn’t know the difference.
While South Park is never
anything but on the nose, it seems that Bay took it as advice rather than
satire.
It may seem churlish to complain that a film about
shapeshifting alien robots doesn’t make sense, but the least we can expect is
narrative cohesion. It doesn’t help that
almost every line of dialogue is shouted but the plot is so convoluted with
scene after scene of exposition, most of which falls to a
just-here-for-the-money Anthony Hopkins.
It’s also unhelpful that the one remotely interesting character,
Isabella Moner’s orphan mechanic Izabella is jettisoned mid way through and for
vague reasons. Laura Haddock tries admirably with an utterly knuckle-headed
role as an Oxford professor of just about everything and direct descendant of
the wizard Merlin (no, really). Hopkins,
as some kind of Earl, aims for eccentric but lands somewhere between irritating
and embarrassing, matched only by his horrific Transformer butler, Cogman.
The supporting cast, which includes the slumming-it likes of
Rebecca Front, Stanley Tucci, Glenn Morshower, John Turturro and Tony Hale, and
the found-his-level Josh Duhamel, do their best not to look ashamed of their
career choices and the Transformer voices are as appallingly portentous or
irritating-as-thrush as they always were.
The plot, as much as I understand it, is a mix of Arthurian
legend and Cybertron-induced apocalypse.
Mark Whalberg’s shouty hero finds a MacGuffin which only he can use and
this leads him and Haddock to find another MacGuffin, which apparently has some
kind of vaguely described power which only she can use. Meanwhile a dying Cybertron is advancing on
Earth to steal all of our solar panels (not really, but it might as well be). There is also something involving a secret
society who protect the secret history of Transformers on earth. Named ‘Witwiccans’ (no, really), their number
included the likes of Shakespeare, Stephen Hawking, and yes, Shia LaBeouf’s Sam
Witwicky (I’m not making this up) who mercifully does not appear.
Yes, the visual effects are impressive, but the best CGI-heavy
films are the ones which know when and where to use it, and that doesn’t mean ‘always’. Bay marshals his action like an ADD child,
making it near impossible to work out what’s going on at any given time, and
this makes the large-scale destruction and robot-on-robot fights un-dramatic
and without thrill.
I had previously thought that Guy Richie’s King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword would
be the worst film of the year to feature knights of the round table but I was
sadly mistaken. Overall, The Last Knight was much like watching one of my
migraines play out on screen: an unending array of confusing colours, bright
lights and pain, but it went on for much longer and wasn’t as much fun.
