un-extinct

needed more john goodman

age of ex-stinked-tion

boom clap

Trans4mers is B.S.I.* - - and I mean that in a good way!

By maintaining a surprisingly consistent earnest tone over it's hours of action sci-fi comedy, Age Of Extinction transcends schlock and becomes an art film of almost operatically stylized violence.

..and of course, Marky Mark makes everything better with his patented megawatt charm.


5 out of 5.




{*Bat Shit Insane}

I'm seeing this tomorrow and sort of can't wait. I want it to hurt.

The Romeo and Juliet law discussion: worst scene of the summer, or worst scene ever?

So anyone actually seen it yet?

Trixster and I have both seen it. I probably hated it slightly more than him.

Wow just wow. The action in this movie was just amazing. 4 out of 5. Second best by far.

Second best out of four isn't a huge accomplishment, especially when Revenge of the Fallen was so bad.

I can't believe my reaction to this compared to seven years ago when the first came out. So excited then. Indifference doesn't even describe it now, but I want it to rock.

If this is better than DotM, then I'll be happy.

I mean the dialogue is not good at all and Nicola Peltz particularly can't act (though she gotta nice body). However, the action at hand is more enjoyable than the past two entries so this film gets a pass. At least I'm interested after this film where the franchise goes from here, something I wouldn't have said after the second or third film.

To be honest, I'm surprised that photo didn't prepare me for just how creepy the film was going to be towards its 17 year old female character.

Creepy... OR AWESOME!?!??!

"We're giving you freedom!" - Optimus Prime to a Dinobot immediately before telling it to follow him or die.

This might be the dumbest film I've ever seen, and that makes it special.

don't h8

I'm not! I mean, it's awful, but it's so goddamn sincere about it. It honestly thinks we're invested in Mark Wahlberg's bronze daughter and her incompetent boyfriend.

Chicago was looking pretty good for a city that everyone kept saying was completely pancaked in the last movie.

The fourth live-action Transformers film is, I am a bit sad to say, just another bad Transformers film. Utilizing the same continuity while focusing on new human characters, director Michael Bay squanders the chance to in any significant way renew or revise the franchise. Mark Wahlberg, busily burning credibility he may have earned with The Fighter and Lone Survivor, stars as an inventor in rural Texas who purchases a decrepit and scorched tractor-trailer which turns out to be a Transformer. This is an awful project for the Boston-bred actor. From his voice to his muscles to his macho presence, he is ill at ease portraying an enthusiastic nerd and family man in his early scenes, and he is often downright grating after transitioning to action-hero mode, shouting such juvenile lines as, "Don't bitch out on me! Don't bitch out on me!" Quote-unquote drama and protective-dad humor involving him, his teenage daughter (molested, of course, by Bay's camera), and her love interest, a chiseled race-car driver from Ireland, is even more rote and uninteresting than it sounds. Transformers: Age of Extinction in general honors the series' most dire traditions, from shoehorned-in grade-school humor to explosion-to-explosion storytelling which is at once simplistic and confounding. Capable performances by Kelsey Grammer (as a brooding, anti-Transformers CIA honcho) and Stanley Tucci (as a capitalist aiming to monetize recovered alien technology) are enticing, and they deliver their expository dialogue with as much flair and/or menace as they can, but even gifted actors can only do so much.

It is amazing how the one-note, punishing aesthetic and tone turns events which should be interesting, such as a wild prologue revealing alien robots caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, into bland motions and noises signifying nothing as they enter and exit the mind. And at 165 minutes, this film truly is the definition of bloated and indulgent: it just goes on and on and on and on. A Chicago-set orgy of combat and destruction plays as an overblown finale, but it is just a second-act diversion before the storyline switches to mainland China and Hong Kong. Enduring close to three hours of this nonsense is borderline numbing, though, I admit, Bay and his team now and then deliver a moment of interesting production design or high-flying, how-did-they-do-this photography. Such instances briefly please the senses. Briefly. Also modestly amusing is the absurd, but to be expected amount of sumptuous product placement, the flames and debris and crashing robot figures often perfectly framing billboards during the interminable fights. The products sold range from Beats by Dre to Bud Light to Victoria's Secret to the military of the People's Republic of China.

D

Oh man... where to even begin with Transformers: Age of Extinction? (I would say that it's probably not best to type this review while under the influence, but let's be honest, that's really the best state for one to be in while assessing the artistic merits of Optimus and pals onscreen.) I really enjoyed the first film, but was greatly disappointed with each of the sequels, so I went into this one with very low expectations, and those expectations were mostly met (and man, if that's not a backhanded compliment, I don't know what is). Taken at a surface level, this movie is remarkably stupid. The plot - or what little of it surfaces over the course of an insanely-long 165 minutes (like, seriously, did no one at the studio suggest that this thing be a mercifully-short two hours?) makes no damn sense whatsoever. Despite resetting the universe as far as the human characters are concerned, the robots are still operating under the context of the first three films, and the background information to make these two storylines work with one another is as minimal as possible. As is customary with a Transformers sequel, plot holes dominate the majority of the running time. For example: why in the bluest of blue hells would a government that has seen firsthand the kind of destruction the Decepticons can put together want to hunt down every single one of the Autobots (y'know, the only beings that can realistically protect them from extraterrestrial beings with enormous guns?)? It's a question that lingers on the mind of every single thinking viewer who has seen the previous films, but never seems to occur to any of the characters in this film. Furthermore, many of the new characters suck. Bless Mark Wahlberg for instantly being a more capable protagonist than Shia LaBeouf in the last film, but I felt more sympathy for his Daniel Lugo in Pain and Gain (who, for the uninitiated, was the completely unsympathetic protagonist) than I did for the everyman protagonist in this film. The amount of blandness present from an actor who is usually so vibrant is shocking and saddening. Moreover, Nicola Peltz earns the dubious honor of being the most wholly misogynistic persona that Bay has ever depicted onscreen (honestly, would it kill the guy to have one strong female character? Just one who doesn't seem completely helpless? I'd love to see Emily Blunt's character from Edge of Tomorrow show up and kick the asses of every character onscreen). Even though her relationship to Wahlberg begins to oh-too-obviously mirror the one between Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler in Bay's Armageddon, the complete and total lack of depth ultimately makes that piss-poor relationship between Willis and Tyler look like Oscar material by comparison. As awful as the interactions between Willis and Tyler were in the aforementioned film, I could at least kind-of, sort-of believe that they were related (it helped that the boyfriend in Armageddon was played by Ben Affleck rather than the guy who plays the bf in this film), but I never believed it here for one of the film's many, many seconds. Naturally, given the weight that the film gives to the relationship between father and daughter in this film, I was left completely deprived of emotion during the moments that were meant to be intense between father and daughter.

However, if there's anything that almost singlehandedly saves the film, it's the midway entrance of Stanley Tucci. Wahlberg appears to acknowledge that he's in a terrible film for a paycheck (or that he's willingly working once again with a director who got a great performance out of him - seriously, go watch Pain & Gain, y'all), but Tucci owns every second that he's onscreen with an amount of cynicism and lack of guilt that seems to fit this project perfectly. He knows that he's in a film with a terrible script, and as such, he heightens the utter cartoonishness of the situations admirably. Unlike Wahlberg - whose performance admittedly isn't bad so much as misguided - Tucci appears to be having fun and to be winking all-so-knowingly at the audience to not take the proceedings too seriously. And man alive, the casting of John Goodman as one of the Autobots was genius. If only one of his lines had been "Smokey, you're entering a world of pain..."

As a film with a story to tell, Age of Extinction is a reeking piece of shit. The production value is obviously impeccable (any Oscar nominations for sound or visual effects will definitely not be unearned). That being said... was anyone really expecting anything good out of it? Even with the change of scenery, it's clear that Bay's heart was more in (the still very underrated) Pain & Gain than it was in this film, and it doesn't work at all on any legitimate levels. All of that said, as someone who went in expecting a crappy movie and to come out with little more than rules for future drinking games, I enjoyed it thoroughly. For all of the wrong reasons, this movie may well be the most enjoyable of 2014. As a movie in its own objective right, it undeniably sucks. As something that can provide future enjoyment for all the wrong reasons (or, hell, given the cynicism that permeates Hollywood, maybe these reasons were the ones that the filmmakers intended all along), I have to give it some credit for being enjoyable on a wholly ironic, postmodern level, even moreso than its two most immediate predecessors.

D+ (although, honestly, as I hinted at during multiple points in this elongated review, this thing defies a proper letter grade)

How did Kelsey Grammer, a talented actor of television for decades, finally get two high-profile film roles in TF4 and Expendables 3 (I mean, they're throwaway films, but they're still money-makers) after his most noteworthy film was Down Periscope?

I'll throw in X3 in there as well. Has he been turning down movies or did he just strike it rich this year?