Transformers: The Last Knight

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In Transformers: The Last Knight, Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg) has become something of a legend. A human military unit called the TRF is hunting all transformers now. Cade searches for autobots, tryng to help them if he can. Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) has disappeared after the events of Age of Extinction. He finds his creator, the villainous Quintessa (Gemma Chan). She brainwashes him so that he will destroy Earth, which apparently is Unicron. There’s a secret order dedicated to protecting the secrets of the transformers run by Lord Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) and his transformer butler / assistant Cogman (voiced by Jim Carter). An Oxford profsseor (Laura Haddock) is tied into the whole thing. She is last remaining descendant of the wizard Merlin (Stanley Tucci). A teenage girl (Isabela Moner) who has been living as an orphan in a wasteland Chicago becomes entwined Cade’s life. As you can probably tell just by reading that description, The Last Knight has a lot going on in it. And I haven’t even scratched the surface of this movie’s hundreds of subplots and characters. I enjoyed the hell out of watching this movie, but it is far from “good.” This is mostly because the story almost never makes any damn sense. The action scenes are a little easier to make out here than they were in Age of Extinction. I liked the performances by Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Isabela Moner, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, and Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins really stands out to me because it’s Anthony freaking Hopkins. John Turturro shows up in the movie for a little bit, and he doesn’t really add anything to the plot. Jerrod Carmichael just irritated me whenever he showed up, and felt just as useless as Turturro did. At the very least, the rest of the main cast seemed to serve some sort of purpose. Characters seemed to get from one place to another without any explanation. There were characters given some sort of relevance whose name I never even knew when I was watching the movie. Prime barely appears in the movie. The whole TRF thing is a complete retread of Age Extinction. Overall, The Last Knight was enjoyably insane, but also was an incoherent, messily plotted movie. It had good performances, but it had useless and annoying characters. If you’ve never been a fan of the Transformers movies, this isn’t the one that’s going to sway you. But, if you’re like me, and hold this franchise in guilty pleasure regard, then I recommend giving it a watch.

6 / 10