Transformers: The Last Knight as dumb as expected

Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Last Knight. Image courtesy Paramount.

To begin with, the title for Transformers: The Last Knight is incorrect. There are several knights to be found in this movie, all of whom interact with other knights throughout the movie. There is nary a final knight to be found in this movie, making the title the warning sign for a wretched movie that sucks the energy right out of its audience.

Watching The Last Knight is a dire experience. It has so little going for it that the asinine madness Sir Anthony Hopkins inserts out of his general lack of interest in the material is the best thing the movie has going for it. Everything else is garbage, detritus spawned by barely earned nostalgia and producers sucking those happy thoughts for all the money they are worth. And that's how movies like this come to be, prepackaged as big budget experiences targeted at people who care little for the value of their entertainment. The old fashioned way of describing them are rubes, making director Michael Bay, producer Steven Spielberg, and everyone else involved in creating this rubbish high-priced grifters.

None of this really matters though. The Last Knight will make hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more than a billion dollars, at the box office in the coming weeks. People will watch this despite protestations from many, many people over its lack of quality. This is the dark side of nihilism that doesn't reveal the optimism of nothingness once the absence of importance is accepted. What's being accepted here is bad cinema with too much regard devoted to viewers who take pride in their anti-intellectualism.

To be fair, movies don't need to be smart to have value; the Furious series is pretty great despite how legitimately dumb those films are. Yet they possess both passion and insanity, a desire to entertain their viewers and provide satisfaction for the money spent. The Last Knight does not entertain. A movie supposedly about giant robots fighting one another somehow cannot provide entertainment, even on the fun side of the puerile level. This movie very much lingers on the dark side of juvenile, with a few bits of casual racism and Marky Mark Wahlberg comparing his female co-star Laura Haddock to a prostitute added in to serve as jokes. That it sexualizes pretty much all of its female characters, including a 14-year-old (played by Isabela Moner), is disturbing but expected for this series. Still, none of it actually provides an iota of entertainment. Nothing keeps viewers interested in the characters on screen or the fact that, sometimes, giant robots fight one another to the death.

It's about right that The Last Knight only shows its giant, morphing robots fight on just a few occasions, holding franchise stalwart Optimus Prime in the background until the final act. Bay and company instead toss in some elements that, if one squints hard enough, begin to resemble a story and allow Wahlberg and Haddock to serve as the centers of attention instead of the giant fighting robots. It would have helped if the screenwriters actually tried to keep their narrative logical and create contradicting plot points, or if the haphazard editing had stuck with a logical timeline. There's also some awful, hacky, and terribly worded expositional dialog to move things forward, because this movie doesn't feel the need to show what's happening or allow the actions to guide story.

The selling point for The Last Knight is the action sequences, or at least they would be if viewers could actually follow along with the poorly framed battles. At this point in the series it's tough to find a way to inject interest in seeing the same giant robots fight one another to the death. Bay and crew have effectively run out of ideas on how to make these sequences look cool, which is an odd thing to say considering this is a franchise about giant robots with guns, explosives and swords going at one another. Bay, for all his faults as a filmmaker, used to create singular, well orchestrated action sequences that at least came close to making what are otherwise bad movies at least a little fun. Five films into the Transformers franchise and the thrill is gone for Bay.

Without any redeeming value aside from the scenery Hopkins consumes, The Last Knight is a slog. It leaves them drained from boredom and confusion over the preposterous state this film exists in, and the two-and-a-half hours of it to sift through. But, again, none of this really matters. A ton of people will watch this movie, more than enough to fund two more movies in the near future. Critics will rip them apart to as Bay, Spielberg and Paramount executives sleep comfortably in the piles of money they've conned out of audiences everywhere.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 149 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks who've been roped in to the last few entries.

Take the whole family?: This isn't particularly great for the younger kids, with the heavy doses of violence and bad editing creating a less than comforting viewing experience.

Theater or Netflix?: Just don't bother with it.

How good is the cast?: Of a higher quality than expected, although none of them seem to care. It remains strange how many good actors sign up for these movies. Sir Anthony Hopkins, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Ken Watanabe, and Tony Hale are the highlights for film five. Add them to alumni like Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk, and many, many others and there's the making for a really good movie. Even American hero Buzz Aldrin has shown up for one of these movies.

Watch this instead?: Best bet is to find a copy of the animated Transformers movie from the '80s – it has a surprisingly stellar cast, including Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack and Judd Nelson – or watch the original animated series. That, or just find your old toys and make up a way cooler story.

Patriots Day misses the point

Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Monaghan in Patriots Day. Image courtesy CBS Films.

There is the old saw about how art is meant to stir strong emotional reactions in the people absorbing it; good art, in essence, leaves a person feeling something different than before. Strong emotional responses aren’t always a sign of quality though, as is the case with the wretched Boston Marathon bombing film Patriots Day.

It isn’t necessarily too soon for a film about the bombings and the ensuing days of surreal discomfort; three years is enough time to consider the implications and find insight for what happened. I actually signed up to serve as an extra for it along with hundreds of other locals (I was not selected to be in it) because of the potential such a film could have: The events surrounding the bombings had enough intrigue and action to make for a rather good film like United 93 if done with the same level of sensitivity and filmmaking competence. And director Peter Berg, who is listed as one of three writers on this film, has shown himself to be a generally OK action director; even the otherwise not good Deepwater Horizon sports some pretty solid action sequences. That trait carries over at least a little to Patriots Day, which stages the bombings in an effective and riveting fashion, coming out of nowhere in a sense befitting the actual event.

If the rest of Patriots Day had followed that track this film would at least be interesting. Things though go awry completely shortly after the bombs go off and the bodies of the victims are shown, limbs and shoes strewn across Boylston Street in an unnecessarily blunt fashion. The lowlight of the sequence comes with the presence of a dead child, his body covered by a white sheet. That body represents the real-life victim, an 8-year-old boy and one of three victims from the bombing itself. Berg and his writers can't help but have other characters repeatedly point at the body on the ground, using the death of a child as a prop and showing little actual regard for the child's existence. It's a grotesque display of filmmaking and tastelessness by Berg.

Not that Patriots Day had its priorities set heading to that point. Things open poorly enough when Mark Wahlberg's loose cannon of a cop breaks down a door to arrest some guy unrelated to the bombings itself. The film opts to track the lives of people affected by the bombings from the night before throughout, most of whom are real people played by rather famous actors. To be fair, the cast is a pretty solid, if extremely underutilized, collection of character actors, including John Goodman, Michael Beach, J. K. Simmons, Kevin Bacon, Khandi Alexander, Michelle Monaghan and others. The film even finds time to try to tell the story of the bombers themselves, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (played by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze, respectively). It's a lot for one film to process, meaning Berg and his writers don't have an adequate amount of time to understand the personalities and beats of each character, especially the disappointingly unexamined Tsarnaevs.

The one character who the audience does get to know is Wahlberg's sergeant Tommy Saunders, who is fittingly a composite character mixed in with the real people. Saunders is a frustrating character, his apparent alcoholism shown and immediately abandoned despite the pressure of the situation he's involved with, which would realistically result in more drinking. That his figure is vital to the investigation is rather offensive to the real cops and citizens who actually did his character’s work. Considering how many real-life figures are depicted as heroes, using Saunders to cover others up is a little ridiculous. That Saunders just appears everywhere is perplexing, including areas of outside of Boston proper that are not within his jurisdiction. He's a redundant character in a film with far too many figures already.

Patriots Day can’t decide what it wants to be. Attempts at a realistic overview of the bombings are scuttled by the intrusion of Wahlberg’s Saunders. A fictionalized outlook of the moments from the day before through David Ortiz’s famous speech at Fenway is cut short by the attempts at verisimilitude. A bit at the end with interviews of victims and a few notable officials is off putting and adds nothing to the film itself besides wondering why Berg and Wahlberg couldn’t just finance a good documentary instead of producing a clunky, disgraceful flick.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 133 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Theoretically people in Boston, but it’ll more than likely tick many of them off.

Take the whole family?: The film shows the bombs going off and a pretty brutal shootout, so stick right around the rating level.

Theater or Netflix?: Skip it.

What else is bad about this film?: Aside from probable slander against Katherine Russell (Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife), the film plays fairly loose with the legality of the decisions made to find the Tsarnaevs. There are certain bits acknowledged by the filmmakers, but they never show any interest in considering the ramifications of the search and the interrogation of Russell. The ends seem to justify the means with this film, which is not overly surprising given how stupid this film is but still serves as another reason for frustration and ire.

Watch this instead?: Doing films based on real life tragedies is difficult but still doable. One of the better options is the subtly complicated Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan. Also worth a watch are Gus Van Sant's Elephant and David Fincher's Zodiac.

Deepwater Horizon dragged down by storytelling woes

Mark Wahlberg stars in Deepwater Horizon. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

The theoretical appeal for the remarkably subpar Deepwater Horizon is its based on true events nature, in this case the explosion of the titular oil rig off the coast of Louisiana in 2010. Films like this are akin to a backstage pass to watch a tragedy unfold in real time and see where things went awry. People want to understand what went wrong for an event like the Deepwater Horizon explosion to occur and film is a logical medium to tackle that curiosity; it's simpler to visualize these events rather than parse through lawsuits and transcripts from investigative committees. Yet the process is less honest this way, the necessity of compressing hours of reality into less than two hours of film and the requirement of providing a captivating narrative trumping a direct and truthful discourse of the situation. Director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg had a similar issue arise with their previous collaboration/enactment of true events Lone Survivor, which shed most of its nuance for a loud, dense, manipulative serving of America.

Deepwater Horizon is somehow worse, simply abandoning the concept of subtlety for tremendous doses of sloppy foreshadowing and outlandish, easy to identify bad guys to blame for the explosion. The villains, in this case a collection of BP representatives highlighted by John Malkovich, are portrayed as money-grubbing, out of touch snobs focused more on their important time tables than the safety of the good, hardworking folks on the rig. They're effectively cartoon characters to shove the blame on, simple scapegoats for the audience to root against as their demands become more and more outlandish. Casting Malkovich as the biggest bad is both a tremendous and a terrible idea – brilliant for exaggerating the Snidely Whiplash nature of the character, but awful for adding layers or depth to the corporate shill. That the film is factually inaccurate with its representation is doubly worrisome; while BP deserves the lion's share of the blame for the explosion, TransOcean (the company that owned Deepwater Horizon and is portrayed favorably in the film) and Halliburton were at fault as well. There's no expectation for Deepwater Horizon to be a piece of journalism or documentary, although it remains dangerous for any film to effectively slander people just for storytelling convenience.

Truth is a secondary concern for Deepwater Horizon; the film's tagline uses the line “real life heroes” to describe the people on the titular vessel. But it's interesting though how anonymous most of the heroes are in this film, how much the movie focuses on the deeds of Wahlberg's Mike Williams and, to a lesser degree, Deepwater Horizon manager Jimmy Harrell (played by Kurt Russell). This is not an ensemble film despite the multitude of names on the poster, meaning the multitude of people who saved others amid the chaos are left on the sidelines, memorialized during a brief run in the end credits. One character who is given a few seconds to sacrifice himself to save the others is summarily killed off with rather over-the-top Foley work above it (and it isn't not the first time Berg has valued sound effects over verisimilitude). That Berg and company spend so much of their time throwing stones at Malkovich’s group provides even less time for the film’s heroes to show their valor.

There is, however, a fair amount of beauty covering the flaws. The strongest selling point is the wonder of the images once the Deepwater Horizon catches on fire and the crew has to navigate through the flames and chaos ensues. One shot involving Wahlberg and Gina Rodriguez (as Andrea Fleytas) alone as the world burns around is awe-inducing and deservedly memorable. Deepwater Horizon comes close on occasion to being a serviceable survival/disaster flick in the mold of The Poseidon Adventure, complete with the visuals and a couple moments of tension to keep audiences engaged. Deepwater Horizon is a film better served from the outside in, its aesthetics worthy enough to make it occasionally watchable.

Rubbing off the foundation though reveals all of those problems and then some. It's a film with an overabundance of patriotism (including a rather blatant reference to the Star-Spangled Banner) that's used to make the British-based oil company slightly more evil than it would be otherwise. Deepwater Horizon condescends to its audience, trusting visceral reactions will supersede intellectual curiosity while casting stones with little regard for how hard they’ll land.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 107 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Mark Wahlberg and films involving true tragedies.

Take the whole family?: There's enough blood and destruction to bother kids, so try to stick right around the PG-13 rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Even though the effects are solid, it isn't worth paying out for the theater trip.

Any hopes for Patriots Day?: If it is anything like the last two Peter Berg/Mark Wahlberg collaborations, no. The film, about the Boston Marathon bombing from 2013, is even more recent than the last two real-life flicks they've done, making the wounds much fresher and the need for a light touch that much more important. Their films are blunt like anvils, which is exactly the wrong way to handle that project.

Watch this instead?: Fruitvale Station uses the same storytelling technique Deepwater Horizon has but does so with much more grace and general quality. You could also hit up The Poseidon Adventure for a solid brain-wasting disaster flick.