Danielle Solzman
Transformers: The Last Knight is one of the dumbest action films of the year and you’ll still see it anyway.
Directed by Michael Bay, the film stars Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel, Laura Haddock, Jerrod Carmichael, Isabela Moner, Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, Santiago Cabrera, Liam Garrigan, Mitch Pileggi, and Glenn Morshower. Peter Cullen returns as the voice of Optimus Prime.
The film picks up after the events of Age of Extinction, a Transformers film that I passed on after feeling let down by Dark of the Moon. There’s not many good things I can say about the movie other than how much I enjoyed Sir Anthony Hopkins’ performance. He won’t get any Oscar nominations for his role but it’s a nice change of pace for the Bay-directed series.
More so, this is probably the best King Arthur film you’ll see this year, which isn’t saying much following the awful film that was King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Fun fact: Liam Garrigan has played King Arthur twice on screen now. His most recent appearance came during Once Upon A Time. Stanley Tucci gives us a drunk Merlin who negotiations with one of the Cybertronian Knights. I didn’t even recognize him and had to double check who he played during the credits. There’s way too many characters to keep track of in this film, which delivers more action than it probably should.
Laura Haddock joins the series as Viviane, the last descendant of Merlin, and the only one who can hold the staff. Sir Edmond Burton (Hopkins) recruits the Oxford scholar to worth together with Cade Yeager (Wahlberg), who returns from the previous movie. The two have great chemistry together on screen. Josh Duhamel’s William Lennox returns after not appearing in the fourth film. Lennox is working with the Transformers Reaction Force (TRF) and a while, he’s working against the Transformers and Yeager. It isn’t until later in the film where everybody teams up to take down Megatron, the Decepticons, and Quintessa.
A mid-credits scene teases another film with Quintessa now on Earth and offering scientists a way to destroy Unicron. Whether this will lead into Transformers 6, I don’t know. Both Bay and Wahlberg are done with the series. Through the time periods depicted in the film, we may be able to see other time periods shown in the unnecessary future films.
