Review: Set five years after Dark of the Moon, Transformers: Age of Extinction sets out to continue the franchise, taking a new path in more than one way. Lots of explosions, action scenes and robots wrecking cities up and weve got ourselves the fourth one.To begin with, there were a lot of weak points, the biggest challenge being the fact that the entire human cast was replaced. I felt that Wahlberg and Tucci did a good job, but the rest of them were terrible. A lot of it has to do with writing: the characters were shallow and didnt have any depth at all. At a running time of 2h45min you think it would be enough to flesh them out but no. Wahlbergs daughter just yells Dad! and screams her entire screen time. Her boyfriend is shoehorned in just to complete the clumsy romance but in the end is just a tool to move the plot. Sophia Myles, amongst others, is completely wasted. The fact that Bay chose to concentrate on the humans again, and failed with it again, speaks volumes.It was, however, good to see how Cade (Wahlberg) first comes across Optimus Prime and being a mechanic/inventor, revitalizes the beaten leader. The focus also shifted from Bumblebee to Prime as the main link to the protagonist, but oddly it was never explained why Bee left Sam in the first place, being his most loyal protector.Now, speaking of techs in the film, there was a lot of slow-mo. A lot. And it really took away from the action. It is okay to employ slow-mo sometimes, for example when the robots are transforming, but not at every single shot. Moreover, the transformings themselves were weaker than in the previous installments. I mean, in the first one when Starscream transformed into a plane in the middle of the flight or they were fighting/transforming in the narrow street, or in DotM during the fights, this depth was lacking in AoE. Also the fights werent as good compared with the gigantic robot battles or human black ops tactics in previous films. Lastly, as cheesy as it may sound Optimus Prime riding Grimlock was pretty awesome. Even if Grimlock was in the movie for about ten whole minutes. And Lockdown the bounty hunter as the main villain was also done nicely.The film is way too long, the beginning stretches a lot, the middle even more, the finale as well. We are treated to a lot of badly written human characters who just slow the movie down and stretch. Even the endless explosions got tiring (boom, boom, boom and slow-mo all the time, why oh why?). But honestly, going in I thought this would be loads worse. In the end though, not as good as the first or the third, but still better than the second (not that this should count for anything as that was plain awful). Altogether, too long, too stretchy, way too much slow-mo, too shallow characters, some decent fights and action, Prime riding Grimlock and Wahlberg being his usual self. Could have been worse but not by much. |
