Ya know, I really like to watch movies at least twice before I review them. It allows me to have my first reaction, take in the movie as a whole, and then go back in to pick it apart and analyze it. For Transformers: Age of Extinction, I'm not going to do that for reasons that will become obvious below. This is really just going to be me talking about how shit this movie was, not really a review.
I use the word "shit" a lot in this review. There are two reasons for this, reason number one being that I wrote the review at 2 in the morning, reason number two being that "shit" is really the best way to describe the movie.
The city of Chicago should feel lucky that so many of their residents died in the third movie lest they endure the fourth
Mark Wahlberg plays "Cade Yeager", a part-time scientist/inventor, part-time shitty father, full-time hunk. Nicola Peltz plays his 17-year-old daughter "Tessa" and Jack Reynor plays her maybe Irish, maybe just an idiot sounding boyfriend "Shane". Also Erlich from Silicon Valley is there for a minute before he just kind of dies.
I'm probably not going to be completely accurate with regards to certain points of the plot. That is partly because there wasn't really a plot. Bear with me.
Let's get this over with.
Soundtrack/Score:
I mean it had the traditional "robots beating the shit out of each other" type music. Didn't really expect much here.
There were a couple Imagine Dragons songs thrown in there. I don't really mind their music but I wouldn't call myself a fan. I will say that these songs did seem out of place though. Maybe because these songs convey more emotion than this movie was capable. Maybe because I was just looking for things to hate at minute 180. Maybe both.
I was almost disappointed that there weren't any Nickleback songs in the final cut, however.
Writing/Script:
Heh heh. Well. The writing was -- take a guess -- pretty bad! So bad in fact that I actually don't know what the fuck was going on even after going back and reading plot summaries.
Basically Mark Wahlberg is a broke inventor trying to make ends meet while also neglecting being a present father to his kid, but also being super over-protective? He accidentally buys Optimus Prime in semi-truck form and brings him back to life or some shit. After a run in with some black ops-esque military outfit, Wahlberg, his daughter, and her annoying-as-shit boyfriend agree to help Optimus and the other autobots in their corporate espionage plot which consists of the three humans breaking into an extremely secure government contractor robotics lab and then the robots blowing the shit out of said lab because at the end of the day, this is a Transformers movie after all. Then they have to go to China or some shit and fight a fake Megatron and Optimus recruits dinosaur robots (with only like 20 minutes of the movie left, huge letdown) and I don't even know what. There are other shitty subplots that I'm choosing to ignore. At least with the other movies we could all ignoring the terrible writing by staring at Megan Fox.
I'd take toe-thumbs over this crock of shit movie any day.
OH. I almost forgot this gem of a plot point. Mark Wahlberg's daughter is 17 in this movie while her boyfriend is 20 or something. Marky is obviously upset for obvious, statutory rape reasons. Shane the boyfriend then cites the relevant law stating that if both parties are consenting and had been in a relationship prior to one party turning 18 that it is perfectly legal (or something to that effect). This by itself is kind of weird; that the guy has the law completely memorized. To drive the point home, though, this creepy motherfucker pulls out a laminated card with the law written on it. How often does that come up in conversation that laminating a card with your excuse for banging a 17-year-old make sense?
How Well Does it Hold Up:
I would hope to God that a movie with such a huge budget would have exceptional visual effects, which this movie does. It's one of the few good things in Transformers. I'm not a big fan of movies that revolve around huge, computer generated characters but I can't deny that this one looks nice. Plus explosions. Those were nice too. Also there were robot dinosaurs. Everyone can appreciate that.
I don't know why. I don't want to know why.
Acting:
Eh. It wasn't terrible I guess. The only person that stood out to me as an exceptionally shitty actor was Jack Reynor but a large portion of the blame for that could be placed on the shoulders of the writers really.
Some people have off days, some people have off movies. No hard feelings.
What Issues it Tackles:
Fuck off
My rating: A very soft 4.5. 4 of those points being awarded for the explosions.
There were plenty of things wrong with this movie. If you want to hear me bitch about it in detail feel free to talk to me in person (I'm guessing you don't). I really think it would have been much better if it weren't so god damn long, though. I can only watch robots beat the shit out of each other with forced subplots for so long and 2 hours and 45 minutes is way too fucking long.
--Mat
We're done here.
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