Transformers: Age of Extinction Review

Calling this a fresh start was a marketing position rather than a creative one. The human cast changes, the structure does not, and the film runs a hundred and sixty five minutes with a plot that keeps handing off between a bounty hunter Transformer, a defence contractor building his own robots and a corporate villain in Chicago before relocating to Hong Kong for a finale shaped by the film's Chinese co financing. The product placement is so unembarrassed that a character stops to drink a named beer during an alien invasion.

Mark Wahlberg is a robotics inventor who cannot pay his mortgage, and the script devotes a scene to a laminated card explaining why his daughter's older boyfriend is legally in the clear, a joke it repeats twice. The Dinobots, sold on every poster, appear with roughly twenty minutes remaining and are ridden like horses. Kelsey Grammer is the one performer treating the material as a job worth doing. It made a billion dollars, which explains everything.