Filmmaker Michael Bay has made only one non-Transformers movie since the first motion picture in the current series hit screens in 2007.
Allowing for two years of production on the first film, he’s spent nearly all of the last eight years of his life directing giant robot movies.
You can imagine the dilemma this created by the time he went to make the current film: “Transformers: Age of Extinction.” Getting up in the morning, grabbing a cup of coffee, and settling in for another day of, “So, Michael, should the robot twist this way, or that way, in this shot?”
I’m being snarky, of course. “Age of Extinction” displays Bay’s considerable talents for three things: making great looking movies, staging terrific action scenes, and framing gorgeous shots of sunsets, cars, and women.
Filmed with the new IMAX 3D digital cameras, “Age of Extinction” has a visual fidelity that exceeds anything else I’ve seen. This does wonders for the combat scenes, as the robots no longer look like a messy jumble of parts, but have more clarity than in the preceding movies.
Also, Bay choreographed the action to look good in 3D. At a time when many of his fellow filmmakers are cheating by simply pointing their camera in the general direction of the action and shaking it violently, Bay knows people are paying to SEE a movie. His camera moves, but never leaves its focal point, and the action flows logically from shot to shot. As much as I enjoyed the robot fights, which only a churl would say is anything less than spectacular, my favorite action scenes centered on the human characters. In one, a father and daughter attempt to descend on shaky wires from a spaceship to a skyscraper while a robot battle rages around them. You will tense up. In another, actor Mark Wahlberg (the father) descends the side of a dilapidated apartment building by jumping from balcony roof to balcony roof.
And of course, there are plenty of sweeping shots of characters set against beautiful backdrops, cars no one can afford growling down the road, and of women wearing impossible footwear. (Why would a farm girl wear heels that hike her butt up to her shoulders?)
Without a doubt, Bay spent a lot of someone else’s money to create a visual and aural experience that justifies today’s jacked up ticket prices. Of course, that didn’t leave much money for the dialogue and the acting.
This time, I’m not being snarky.
The story is stock material. It’s been five years since the Battle of Chicago in the third film, and life has more or less returned to normal. The U.S. government has tasked the CIA with eliminating the Decepticons (the bad robots), but the elite squad handling the task is also killing off the Autobots (the good robots). Meanwhile, an inventor named Joshua Joyce has perfected the programmable metal from which the Transformers are made, cleverly (cough) called “transformium,” and is using it to making his own, more advanced robots. Cade Yeager and his daughter are thrown into the mix when Yeager finds an old truck in an abandoned theater he’s clearing out and later discovers it’s Optimus Prime, looking somewhat less than in his prime. The CIA catches the Autobot’s scent and heads for Yeager’s farm, setting in motion events that will take nearly three hours of screen time to wrap up.
While the storyline is far from Shakespeare, it’s serviceable. Bay even pokes fun at the plot in a scene in which Joyce laughs at the absurdity of being on an elevator in Hong Kong and holding a bomb that could turn the entire city and all of its inhabitants into transformium. The dialogue, however, is laughable. Wahlberg says things like, “I know things have been sucky lately,” when speaking to his daughter, while the leader of the CIA’s hit squad unit got to say, “My face is my warrant!” when Yeager tells him to get off his farm. To think someone was paid a lot of money to write that...
Wahlberg is a fine actor, but here, he’s dull, upstaged by the spectacle, as is nearly everyone else. Only Stanley Tucci as Joyce does something interesting with his role - mainly invest it with a mounting lunacy that culminates in the elevator in Hong Kong.
When it comes to visuals and action, Bay and company get better with each Transformer film. But while they make the robots look better with each sequel, they have yet to figure out how to wrap the pyrotechnics around a story and characters worth caring about. If you see “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” you’re going to get what you paid for, which is what Bay and company paid for: phenomenal action with no heart or soul.
Two and a half stars out of four. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language and brief innuendo.