Directed By: Michael Bay

Written By: Ehren Kruger

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Kelsey Grammer, Titus Welliver, Sophia Myles, Bingbing Li, T.J. Miller, James Bachman, Thomas Lennon, Charles Parnell, Erika Fong

The Transformers franchise is one of the most highly anticipated films of 2014.  We have been waiting for three years to see Michael Bay`s renewed version of the Transformers with Mark Walberg cast as the lead. However, the movie I viewed today is not what I expected at all.  Nevertheless this film is not as bad as you might think; Stanley Tucci shines in this mess of a movie with his charismatic character and makes this film worth watching.

Let`s get right to the point though- humanity, as usual, never learns from it’s past and continues to destroy the entire World for two main reasons – Power and Money.  which left Chicago in ruins (I don`t know why Hollywood likes to show the total destruction of certain cities in the United States). Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is a robotic inventor and a single father who takes care of his teenage daughter somewhere in Texas. He invents small versions of robots with the hope of making money on them in the near future. Cade goes to an old and abandoned movie theater to pick up some used, old stuff. After walking around, he finds an abandoned, useless, and almost destroyed truck, and pays over $100 for it. Soon after, he finds out that the old truck is an injured Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), who is still desperate to help save the human race.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has severed its ties with the Autobots and branded them as fugitives. Using data obtained from destroyed Transformers, business tycoon, Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) and his technology firm, KSI, try to recreate a better version of the Transformers, who will be fully controlled by humans.  The main problem for Cade and Optimus Prime and Co. is the paranoid Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), who teams up with the Autobots- ‘Lockdown’(voice of Mark Ryan).  He was sent to Earth by the creator of the Transformers, who wants Optimus Prime to get back to the galaxy. The biggest problem for “The Transformers- Age of Extinction” are the main characters. No, not Cade Yeager, who was not as bad as his “screen daughter” Tessa Yeager (Nicola Peltz) and her 20-year old boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor), whose presence in “Transformers” was absolutely unnecessary and meaningless, in the truest sense of the word. Wahlberg`s daughter annoyingly yells “Dad!” and screams, her entire time on the screen. The dialogue between Shane and Cade is extremely silly and did not make any sense at all. However, Ehren Kruger (writer) decides that we need to hear the childish dialogue of reasons why Cade (Wahlberg) does not want a twenty-years-old boy dating  his teenage daughter. This takes place when there are far more important concerns, such as escaping CIA assassins and bounty hunter robots from another galaxy. The biggest failure of the written script were the parts where Shane says such things as: “I am not here to help you get your daughter; I am here to save my girlfriend.”

I really felt that Wahlberg and Tucci did a good job, or as best as they could, to make this part of The Transformers franchise, but the rest of the cast were simply terrible. A lot of it has to do with writing: the characters were shallow and didn’t have any depth at all. They had no soul, expression, desire, or anything that could make the rest of the characters come alive and be worth cheering for.  A funny part in the film, though, is a Transformer who smokes a cigar…

Michael Bay is the most important American filmmaker working today. With his ability and talent he can make absolutely outstanding films. I have no complaints about the technical parts of the film. The visual effects were impressive and breathtaking. With over a 166 million dollar budget, and at a running time of 2 hours and 45 minutes, Michael Bay could have made an absolutely phenomenal movie that would have hit the box-office breaking all possible records, without giving the other films a chance of surviving. Instead, we get a very weak, uninteresting, incoherent, boring, silly, and complete mess of a film called “Transformers – Age of Extinction”.