Movie Review: Transformer: Age of Extinction

Transformers: Age of Extinction is the fourth movie in the Transformers series and is in a lot of ways a re-launch of the franchise, while not completely disregarding the events of the previous movies.   Age of Extinction takes place five years after the Battle of Chicago in Transformers: Dark of the Moon where robots are now treated as harmful to the Earth. They are targeted by CIA Agent Harold Atinger (Kelsey Grammar) whose group of hired mercenaries work together with a robotic bounty hunter to target all of the robots on Earth, especially leader of the Autobots Optimus Prime who has completely disappeared.  Instead of following Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), we move to Texas and meet Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) who is a mechanic, junk collector, and failed inventor struggling to pay his bills.  Cade finds a semi which he plans to sell for parts until he discovers it's Optimus Prime.  The CIA gains knowledge that Cade has possession of Optimus Prime and while trying to escape, Cade discovers the CIA is using tech from a defense contractor company lead by Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), who seems to be working on a level of robotics beyond even the Transformers.

Michael Bay (Armageddon, Bad Boys) returns to direct this installment, as he has all the previous movies, but some things have changed.  Mark Wahlberg breathes fresh air into the franchise and gives the series a credible leading man.  The recent Transformers movies have had a lot of silly comedy, that doesn't really work in this kind of movie, and it was nice to see they drastically toned that down.  T.J. Miller provides a lot of the comedy relief in this movie and it feels like the most natural fit for the comedy role since Anthony Anderson in the first film.  Kelsey Grammer makes a despicable bad guy and a big improvement over John Turturro's Simmons character from the previous films, who became a huge joke.  We are introduced to new Transformers and other types of robots along the way, the best being the trigger-happy Hound, voiced by John Goodman.

This movie has some great visual effects and Bay knows how to make a big screen action sequence that is jaw-dropping and tremendously impressive.  However, where the movie fails is that it's 3 hours long and feels every bit of it.  Just when you think you are totally drained from watching intense action sequence after intense action sequence, you experience Bayja vu and you get another intense action sequence.  After the first hour, there is very little character development and even when you are introduced to new Transformers, including the debut of the Dinobots in the franchise, if you aren't steeped in Transformers lore before seeing the movie, you may have no idea who these characters are.  While Age of Extinction is a vast improvement over the previous two entries in the Transformers universe, it has it's downfalls, especially compared to big budget action movies like the Marvel movies, where they treat character development equal to action.  If you're looking for a big budget, loud, visual effects movie that will astonish, you will leave satisfied, however leave your brain at home.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is in theaters now.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.