by BoB Grimm
b g ri m m @ne w s re v i e w . c o m
“So, do transformers get car insurance or life insurance?”
Bad form The latest Transformers movie, Transformers: The Last Knight, gets the dubious distinction of being the worst in the series. That is some sort of major accomplishment. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to look at this collective pile of movie manure and decipher which of the five is the worst. It’s like going to a frat house the first week of a semester at Dickhead University and trying to pick out the dumbest, drunkest douche in the place. All of the qualifiers are terribly, criminally lame. I’m giving the award of franchise worst because it’s just so clear how every participant in this enterprise, from director Michael Bay right on down to the production assistant who smeared glycerin on Mark Wahlberg’s pecs, is jaded, tired and played out. Nobody really wants to be in this thing. The stink of “Who gives a shit … just pay me!” hits your nostrils with Wahlberg’s first line delivery. Yes, Wahlberg, who has the honor of essentially being Shia LaBeouf’s stand-in for the series, returns for his second go-round, and he looks embarrassed. He should be embarrassed. He’s publicly declared that this is his last Transformers movie, with his performance and demeanor indicating he checked out the day cameras rolled on this mayhem. You just get the sense of a guy who is mocking the whole thing. Also along for the ride, the formerly acclaimed Mr. Anthony Hopkins, acting all nutty like he did in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, with the big difference being that this is a Michael Bay film as opposed to a Coppola film. So, acting all nutty in a Michael Bay film gives off the impression that you have just given up and thrown any kind of reasonability to the wind with your line deliveries. I can’t pretend to tell you what happens in this flick. I know Optimus Prime was floating towards his home planet all frozen and shit, and he gets sucked into some sort of scheme to betray his race and all humans. His part is kind of like Vin Diesel’s in the last Fast & Furious movie, that of the pawn in somebody else’s evil scheme, who
probably won’t go rogue for the entire film. The big difference here is that Optimus Prime doesn’t get to mush his mouth all over Charlize Theron, and—it goes without saying—Optimus Prime has a greater acting range than Vin Diesel. The best part of this movie is when Hopkins inexplicably goes to Stonehenge to witness a robot battle then gets blown up, leading to the silliest death scene ever. Yep, I just issued a spoiler. Anthony Hopkins dies hilariously in this movie. I hope this spoiler pisses you off so much that you don’t go to the movie. Be mad at me for the next 10 years, but I know I did you a favor. Other folks who show up include John Turturro, whose “I’m in a Transformers movie, but it’s OK because I’ve sold out in an unorthodox, hip sort of way!” shtick got tired four films ago, and the voices of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. That’s actually three quarters of a The Big Lebowski reunion. I’m surprised they didn’t throw some money at Jeff Bridges to deliver a few lines. That would’ve been the most novel thing in the movie. Eh, they probably needed the cash for Mark Wahlberg’s tanning and body hair removal bills. Transformers: The Last Knight plays like a Worst of Michael Bay sizzle reel. It’s two and a half hours of things smashing into each other in fast-cut fashion, accompanied by bombastic music and lots of crane and slo-mo shots. In other words, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect at this point. Picking a time to go see a Transformers movie is like picking a time to have dysentery. Protect yourself, and your innards, by choosing to do something better for your health, like punching yourself in the face until your eyes pop out and your nose falls off. Ω
Transformers: The Last Knight
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SHORT TAKES
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The Bad Batch
3
Cars 3
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her notable feature debut, the authentic vampire story A Girl Walks Home at Night, with another horror story. This time out, it’s cannibals. Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, newly exiled to a desert landscape where she is quickly captured by cannibals and watches as her arm and leg are cut off and devoured. After escaping, she wanders around a bit, eventually stopping by a safe haven run by The Dream (Keanu Reeves). Some business involving the daughter of one of her captors, Miami Man (Jason Momoa a.k.a. Aquaman), represents the only thing that passes for a conventional subplot in this purposefully rambling, meandering affair. Amirpour gets a mixed bag result with her sophomore effort, a film that looks amazing, boasts a great soundtrack, and has a few good creepy passages in it. Still, if a cohesive story is what you seek, you won’t find it here. You will, however, find Jim Carrey in a strange extended cameo as the Hermit, a dude who literally eats crow. The movie never really comes together as a whole, but it’s worth watching if you like post-apocalyptic cannibal movies and Culture Club (Available for download during a limited theatrical release).
The Cars franchise gets a nice little rebirth with Cars 3, a much, much better movie than Cars 2, and a slightly better movie than the first Cars. If you’re keeping score— and, really, you shouldn’t be, for there are far more pressing matters in your life—that still makes Cars 3 one of the more mediocre offerings from Pixar. Still, a mediocre Pixar film is better than most animated movies. Jettisoning the stupid spy movie bullshit—oops, I just cursed in a review for a G-rated movie … sorry, kids—that made the last installment convoluted and useless, the folks at Pixar choose to go an earthier, more emotional route with this one, and it works, for the most part. They also find a way to get the voice of the late Paul Newman into the mix, and hearing his beautiful growl again definitely warms the heart. Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is getting on in years, and he’s facing fierce competition from newer model cars like Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), a strong, highly-trained vehicle that is beating McQueen on the racetrack. After a calamitous accident that renders his beautiful red sheen primer gray, McQueen is faced with either retirement or a new training regime comeback, Rocky III-style. The movie plays around with the notions of retirement and the rites of passage to the next generation, pretty heady stuff for a G-rated animated movie. Give the screenwriters credit for finally coming up with a story for Lightning McQueen that caters as much to adults as it does to kids.
4
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
The trippy Marvel fun continues with this big, nutty, spiraling sequel that brings the fun, along with a lot of daddy issues. Star-Lord, a.k.a. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), had some major mommy issues in the first movie, and this time out his dad takes a turn at messing with his head. The dad comes in the form of Ego (Kurt Russell—yes!), who we see hanging out with Quill’s mom in the ’70s during the film’s prologue. (The CGI and practical makeup anti-aging effects on Kurt Russell ranks as one of the best examples of that particular trick.) After a killer opening credits sequence, the Guardians—including Quill, Baby Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (David Bautista) and Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper)—find themselves on another quest. They are quickly diverted to Ego’s planet, where Quill finds out more about his celestial origins. Russell proves to be perfectly cast as Quill’s bombastic father, with Pratt possessing many of the legendary action film star’s alluring traits. Seeing them on screen together, at one point playing catch with an energy ball Quill conjures with newfound powers, is one of the film’s great joys. But writer-director James Gunn isn’t going to settle for an easy story about a wayward son reuniting with a dream dad.
2
The Mummy
Tom Cruise is fully committed for a gonzo performance as Nick Morton, a soldier moonlighting as a tomb raider in Iraq. After stumbling upon the tomb of an ancient Egyptian nasty named Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), he winds up on a plane with the mummy, some soldiers, and a mysterious woman named Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). The plane crashes, and then the weirdness begins, with Nick surviving the crash due to being possessed by Ahmanet. Post-crash, Ahmanet starts sucking face with cops and dead guys, turning them into a zombie army as she marches on London. Along the way, Nick meets Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) in a subplot so freaking unnecessary it’s maddening. Jekyll is here because he’s part of Universal’s new “Dark Universe” scheme, an attempt to Marvel-size the classic Universal monsters into some sort of connected, ongoing series. What a seriously stupid mistake this is. Nothing connects these monsters other than their original gothic origins, so trying to make them modern stand-ins for Iron Man and the Hulk is a joke. And, take it from me, Dr. Henry Jekyll is no Nick Fury. Cruise is stuck laboring in this convoluted, yet sometimes almost entertaining, mess. The Dark Universe is a bad idea, and the movie suffers for it.
1
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
In the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a bunch of pirates run around and act like dicks while being pursued by ghosts. If my memory serves me right, that is basically the plot of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The new one, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales rehashes the same plot, with Johnny “The Whore” Depp doing his whole drunken Keith Richards pirate routine again as Jack Sparrow. Actually, his Keith Richards routine has devolved into something more akin to Dudley Moore in Arthur 2: On the Rocks. I reference the Arthur sequel, because the original was somewhat funny, but the gag got real tired in part two. So it goes with Depp’s meandering, mumbling, tipsy performance as Jack Sparrow, the feared pirate that everybody in the world seems to have some sort of beef with. He’s laboring with a joke that stopped being funny four movies ago. This time out, a new legion of undead sailors is after Jack due to his having a compass that can lead them back to the land of the living, or some bullshit like that. The band of dead sailors is led by Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), some dude who was trying to rid the world of pirates in his living days, but wound up a cursed ghost under the sea.
4
Wonder Woman
The DC Universe gets the blast of fun it sorely needed with a film that gets it right on almost every front, and features a performance from Gal Gadot that makes it seem the role was her birthright. Gadot lights up the screen and commands the camera on a level with Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey, Jr., in past films of the superhero genre. She simply is Wonder Woman to the extent that I can’t picture another actress ever even attempting to play the character again. She owns it. It’s hers. Game over. There’s always that faction of fans who bitch about superhero origin stories, wanting these films to jump straight to the hardcore action, but I love a good superhero origin story done well, and this is one of them. The movie starts with young Amazonian princess Diana running around in her island paradise, practicing her fight moves and yearning to be trained as a warrior. After butting heads with her sister Antiope, Diana’s mother, Hippolyta, relents, and allows Antiope to train Diana, as long as she doesn’t tell her about the true powers she possesses. For those who don’t know the Wonder Woman back story—I was a little rusty on it myself—it’s a sweet little piece of mythology and mystery, and director Patty Jenkins (the Charlize Theron Oscar vehicle Monster) perfectly paces all the revelations. It says a lot that Gadot and Jenkins make you feel good in a movie that has its share of violence and villainy in it.
06.29.17
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RN&R
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