TRANSFORMERS-AGE OF EXTINCTION: BIGGER ISN'T ALWAYS BETTER

My son and I have had a running debate concerning director Michael Bay. For years I have said that he's not as bad a director as my son has found him to be. I've always found his movies entertaining and action packed. But somewhere along the way Bay has had nothing but yes men tell him every choice he makes is the right one. With TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION I can no longer defend him. He has reached a point of excess that goes too far.

If you've never seen the TRANSFORMER movies then by all means go back and watch the first two and stop at those. As with the third film Bay chooses here to decrease the story and acting on display by real life actors and increase the amount of effects. The film suffers because of that. Yes, stick with the first two and stop.

If you must watch this one here is what we have on hand. Out with the old characters and in with the new. After the semi-destruction of Chicago as seen in the third film, the transformers are now thought of as bad for our planet. They are hunted down and systematically being destroyed. We open up with this hunt and then move to Texas where we find Marc Wahlberg as Cade Yeager.

Yeager is a tinkerer, an inventor with a penchant for all things electronic. Clearing out an old theater he purchases a beat up old semi not realizing that it is actually Optimus Prime, leader of the autobots aka the good transformers. Cade lives with his teenage daughter which of course means she the rebellious sort who goes out dating without his knowledge. After Cade wakes the autobot the next day his partner/slash employee ignores his instructions and calls in the government with the hopes of claiming a cash reward. Instead a group of men in black thugs arrive and threaten the family until Optimus breaks out and saves them.

Now on the run and with a small drone Cade grabbed mid-air as they left their now exploded farm (the first of far too many explosions in this film) they follow the lead it provides them to Chicago. A company there is using the technology of the decepticons to create a new line of transformers, their own militarized groups of automated soldiers for the U.S. to use against any more transformer threats. Need I say that using a decepticon for the software is not a good idea?

All of this leads to the first of many battles between good and bad transformers. Along the way to Chicago the good guys picked up more autobots. Now they take on the new decepticons and begin to once again blow up half of Chicago. But that's not enough. From there the decepticons and the government officials in charge of this new line of robots head for Beijing where we get to see another city nearly destroyed and the battle carry on.

While that may seem like plenty of story in reality it isn't. It is a framework around which Bay has chosen to have far too many car chases and to explode so many vehicles, buildings and transformers that perhaps a third of the films overlong screen time is filled with fireballs and various projectiles. I'm sure this is for the 3D crowd out there but it makes for a boring film.  An hour and 15 minutes into this film and I was already bored. And at 2 hours and 44 minutes I couldn't figure out why it had to be this long.

The actors involved here are wasted but it's not their fault. The script gives them little enough to do except run and shoot and dodge flying material. The special effects are well done but we've seen them already over and over again in the three previous films to the point they aren't as spectacular any longer. Instead we have a display of excess that needs to stop here. My fears are that it won't and we'll get another sequel that will be equally excessive.

See this movie if you must to complete the series. Own it if you like for the same reason. For me I passed on owning the third film for the very reason I won't add this one. It was boring and un-involving for me. It left me with one question: with all the Hollywood stars worried about the environment why do they not have a problem with the wasted fuel used to cause this amount of explosions in a movie? In the end it's not worth your time.

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