Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) is floating frozen in space looking for his and all the Transformers creator. He crashes on the remains of Cybertron to find a dead and broken apart planet heading toward Earth. Prime is brought before Quintessa (voiced by Gemma Chan) who claims to be maker of his race. She tells Prime about a staff that wields great power and will drain the Earth of its life force and revive Cybertron. She puts him under a spell to do her bidding and renames him Nemesis Prime, sending him on a mission to recover the staff. Meanwhile, all Transformers are considered enemies of the Earth and are hunted by a paramilitary unit called the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF) with orders to capture and if necessary kill any and all alien robots. Transformers keep arriving on Earth and helping them as best he can is Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg). He lets them hide out at his junkyard in the middle of the desert. There he has Bumblebee, Hound (voiced by John Goodman), Drift (voiced by Ken Watanabe) and several more. He has had to separate himself from his daughter now in college since the TRF is looking to arrest him. While rummaging in a restricted zone where alien craft have recently crashed (and collecting a metal disk from a dying Transformer), Cade sees a group of young teenagers being chased by a TRF drone. He and Bumblebee save the kids and get them out of the restricted zone. One of them is 14-year old Izabella (Isabela Moner), an orphan whose parents were killed in a Decepticon attack. Izabella is a mechanical genius and has cobbled together from salvaged Transformer parts a mechanical companion she calls Sqweeks. Izabella sneaks her way into Cade’s truck and rides back to his junkyard hideout. There she shows Cade just how handy she is and earns his respect. Cade is contacted by a Transformer named Cogman (Jim Carter) who is the assistant to Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins). Burton wants to see Cade immediately on a matter of urgency to the entire planet. While he’s there he’ll meet Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), a beautiful and headstrong professor of English literature at Oxford University. She and Cade must work together to find the staff in its hiding place on Earth before Nemesis Prime or the Decepticons led by Megatron (voiced by Frank Welker), otherwise the Earth is doomed.

That synopsis doesn’t make much sense. It didn’t help that I left out about 75% of the story but I wanted to keep it as small as possible; however, even if I told you everything that happened in the first hour of “Transformers: The Last Knight,” it still wouldn’t make much sense as this film is the most incoherent, muddled and over-stuffed of all the movies in the franchise. It makes the rambling make-believe of a five-year old seems focused and logical by comparison.

Also similar to a youngster’s make-believe is the way the film jumps from scene to scene and location to location. It gives the viewer cognitive whiplash as the story jumps around like kangaroos in mating season. You might be in a military situation room one moment then cut to an unrelated scene in Cuba the next with no transition. One moment you’re on Earth, the next on Cybertron. Modern times to the Dark Ages and in the desert then under the sea. The movie goes anywhere and everywhere at the drop of a hat never allowing a scene to breathe and actually develop. There are six credited editors on the film’s Wikipedia and IMDB pages. Each must have been exhausted by the constant cutting of the nearly two and a half hour film.

The script is actually worse than the editing. Ranging from incoherent to sexist, the script manages to make every actor in the movie look petty, dumb and childish. Much of it sounds like it was made up on set or in the recording studio. Mark Wahlberg comes off worst of all as his lines sound like they were written for a Saturday Night Live sketch. Always sounding frustrated and exasperated, Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager comes off like a spoiled child unable to get his way. Things get much worse when Laura Haddock’s Vivian Wembley arrives. Sexist dialog abounds coming not only from Cade but also her mother and other female relatives as they implore her to find a husband and settle down.

Let’s also talk about how Vivian is shown on screen in the movie: Tight, form-fitting dresses and button-up shirts that look to be about a half size too small exposing her cleavage in a not terribly subtle way. Attractive women in the “Transformers” franchise have been, let’s face it, nothing but eye candy for the largely male audience these films attract. Megan Fox, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Nicola Peltz and Laura Haddock are all objectified to some extent in these films. While it might have been a little less in the case of Nicola Peltz since she played Cade’s daughter it still was expressed by other male actors in scenes where they weren’t being shot at by military or robots. While each was given some talent or trait that had nothing to do with them being very attractive women, none of them escaped the camera’s leering eye or skimpy wardrobe that amplified their sexiness. There is even a story where Megan Fox was filmed washing Michael Bay’s Ferrari as part of the “audition” for the first film. Both have confirmed it happened and Bay has been quoted saying he isn’t sure where the tape is of the car washing. Fox has also said Bay asked her if she had a nice stomach. All of this has a level of “ick” that no male actor in a major role has ever likely faced except for possibly the “Magic Mike” movies. While I know this isn’t a new problem for actresses in films it is no more blatant than in the “Transformers” franchise.

None of the actors turns in great performances but the winner for having the most fun with his goofy role is Anthony Hopkins. His portrayal of the slightly mad Sir Edmund Burton is the most entertaining thing in the film. He brings a manic yet controlled energy to this performance that seems to say “F—k it! I know this is garbage but I’m going to enjoy myself while I’m drowning in this sea of refuse!” Hopkins is certainly a far better special effect than any of the CGI robots in the film. He isn’t in it nearly enough to save this burning trash heap but when he is on screen your eye and attention will be drawn to him to see what he does next.

While I have not been a big fan of how the Transformers have looked in battle, this film and its Industrial Light and Magic special effects team seems to have cracked whatever problem made the robots indistinguishable from one another when they were in combat. Perhaps it is the use of color that prevents the two robots from seeming to meld into one another when they were fighting. I’m not sure but whatever it is works to make the robot-on-robot action more clear.

“Transformers: The Last Knight” is rated PG-13 for language, intense sci-fi action, some innuendo and violence. There are numerous battle scenes between humans and Transformers with lots of slow motion explosions that throw bodies up into the air. We see some man-to-man fighting as well. There is no gore but you do see people stabbed by swords and rolled over by burning catapult-thrown ammo. Robots are killed by humans and their own kind. There is a scene from the trailer where several Transformers are beheaded by Optimus Prime. There is some awkward effort at sexual innuendo but it is more for comedic effect. Foul language is fairly frequent but doesn’t get much worse than “s—t” or “bulls—t.”

“Transformers: The Last Knight” is likely not the last we’ll see from the robots in disguise. Bumblebee is scheduled to get his own solo movie in 2018 and Michael Bay has said up to 14 more stories have been written and could be produced into films. I’d just like to reiterate, FOURTEEN more “Transformers” movies! And I’m not sure that includes the proposed crossovers with G.I Joe and other Hasbro Toy properties. I wish I could look forward to “Transformers” films the way I do “Star Wars” movies but I just can’t. If history has taught us anything it’s that Michael Bay makes spectacle movies that are crap and it appears, at least domestically, this franchise is beginning to run out of steam. “Transformers: The Last Knight” has the lowest domestic opening weekend of all the franchise with a five day total of $69-million. That’s $50-million below the last film. While it is doing well overseas it appears America’s appetite for fighting alien robots and the humans that love and hate them is beginning to wane. Perhaps audiences are just tired of seeing basically the same movie done over and over again and each one being worse than the last. Whatever the reason, “Transformers: The Last Knight” is certainly the worst of the lot and that’s saying something considering how bad the second film, “Revenge of the Fallen,” is. But let’s face it: None of these films have been great. There is a certain amount of nostalgia that compels some audience members to see one or two of them but that wears off over film after film. If Michael Bay, Hasbro and Paramount Pictures want to keep filling theatres for the next 50 years with another 20 “Transformers” movies, they MUST get better.

“Transformers: The Last Knight” gets one star out of five.

Three new movies look to fill your eyes and minds with their amazing brilliance! I’ll see and review at least one of the following:

Baby Driver—

Despicable Me 3—

The House—

Follow me on Twitter @moviemanstan and send emails to stanthemovieman@comcast.net.

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