An average movie

To be honest, I gave up on this franchise a long time ago but, since this last instalment was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. Like most guys from my generation, I grew up in the 90’s with these toys and cartoons so there was definitely some potential. However, even though these movies were commercially really successful, they turned out to be increasingly boring to watch though. Their main mistake was to keep directing them by Michael Bay for a whopping decade. So, since Bay finally stepped down from the directing chair, maybe there was some hope left for this franchise? I mean, the spin-off ‘Bumblebee’ directed by Travis Knight was still not really amazing but, at least, it was actually a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, this new sequel/reboot/spin-off/whatever turned out to be so underwhelming though. Basically, even if Michael Bay didn’t direct the damned thing, it still felt like one of his movies though. I also felt bad for Anthony Ramos as the guy had to follow up Shia LaBeouf and Mark Wahlberg as the new lead. Sure, he seems to be a nice guy and it must have been awesome to helm such a big blockbuster but I’m afraid he was not charismatic enough. He wasn’t helped by the fact that his character was just so poorly written. I mean, the guy was an ex-military, expert in electronics (an aspect the movie did absolutely nothing with), struggling to find a job and who took care of his sick little brother. Nothing wrong with that but all this grim dramatic stuff didn’t matter much since he out-of-the-blue had to drop everything to save the world. But then, if it didn’t matter at all, why on Earth did they lose some time, energy and attention on this? What was the point? At least, it worked better with Dominique Fishback. Indeed, we learned nothing about her (possibly grim) home situation, she was basically some kind of student archeologist which was just perfect for this kind of story. To be honest, like ‘Bumblebee’ whose main character was played by Hailee Steinfeld, I wish that Fishback, such a charismatic actress, would have played the lead as well here. Concerning the transformers, well, it was the same thing as usual. They were looking for some mysterious gizmo and were involved in some rather underwhelming loud battles every 10 mins which was just as lame as it might sound. Anyway, to conclude, they should really do something different with this material, the damned thing was rather weak and I don’t think it is really worth a look. 

5/10