Jeez, I don’t even know where to start with this eyesore. How about here: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I spent money to go see this movie, and probably just helped make a Transformers 5.

Well, I better get into the “review” cuz that’s why I’m here…

I had seen the first Transformers, and then I caught an hour of Dark of the Moon on TNT last night. I had also seen reviews and all of the Internet videos, so I knew going in that this movie wouldn’t be good. I was just hoping I wouldn’t hate it. Mission Not-Accomplished! Guys, I honestly don’t even know where to start, so this review might seem a bit jumbled.

I guess we should start with the “characters”. So yeah, in this movie they finally got rid of Shia LeBeouf and Megan Fox, and they’re replaced by Mark Wahlberg and Bradley from Bates Motel as a father/daughter duo. So I’m gonna try to do as many positives as I can in this review, and I’ll say this: those two worked well together! But then going to the tear this movie to bits piece of the review. Mark Wahlberg is either not trying hard enough or over-acting in this movie, which would be a complaint but he’s still streets ahead of LeBeouf, so I gotta give it to him there. Then Bradley from Bates Motel, holy God! She’s Michael Bay’s new hot chick in a Michael Bay film. You guys know the drill by now: Michael Bay finds some untalented actress to put in his movies for visual appeal, and then calls action. I’ll touch on this in depth later, but he knows this now too, like there are deliberate pervy shots of her, and she’s supposed to be 17! Now she isn’t very good in this movie, and even in Bates Motel I always thought she was kind of half-trying in her performance, but you kinda feel bad for her. She’s very normal looking in Bates Motel, as a teenage girl should be, but in this terrific piece of cinema, she’s wearing makeup ALL THE TIME. There are scenes where she’s dirty and sweaty, but she still has enough makeup on to look like a Victoria’s Secret model. Ugh, the horror… And then she has this boyfriend that’s completely shoehorned into the movie. I’ll tell you exactly who this guy is, exactly: when Michael Bay realized he could never get Chris Pratt in this movie, he went to the nearest Chris Pratt Look-Alike Contest and found this untalented dude. Then Stanley Tucci is in the movie, and his character feels like two different people. The first half of the movie he’s a business man, but then the second half he’s the shtick Michael Bay humor guy. In case you didn’t know, Michael Bay has one of the worst senses of humor I’ve ever seen.

The funny thing is, the cast is actually one of this monstrosity’s better parts! Now let’s talk about the directing! The best part of the movie actually falls to the ground as the worst part of the movie also. The first 5 minutes of the movie, I thought, “hey, this directing isn’t that bad”. There were some stylish landscape shots and cool tracking shots. But then the rest of the movie happened and actually made me laugh that I had EVER thought that. This directing is unbelievable stupid! First off, all the BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. There was a scene where a Transformer went through a stone wall, and the stone wall blew up! These aren’t even good explosions, they’re the firework-looking explosions that everyone hates! I saw this movie with 5 friends who I will reference throughout this review, and let’s just say 4 of us didn’t want to be there. After the movie, the friend sitting to my right said, “it’s like they started filming on a field mined with fireworks and decide to see what happens”. This was honestly the laziest explosion heavy movie I have ever seen. It’s like Michael Bay challenged himself to make the most lazy action film ever. Mission Accomplished Amigo! And then there were just unbelievable shots that I couldn’t believe made it through editing. The end in particular. It was the middle of the day one second, and then the shot changed and it was sunset. What? But I’m done talking about Michael Bay’s horrible directing. Let’s get onto the script, or as I like to call it: the fun part.

Guys, I have just started watching The Newsroom, which is written by Aaron Sorkin one of my Top 3 screenwriters in Hollywood today. That show is clever and fast and a lot like The Social Network, which I also love. But instead of spending my night watching Episode 3 of Season 1, I got to see this: one of the laziest scripts I have ever had the “pleasure” of watching on the big screen. Just look at the dialogue in this movie! There’s this one line where Optimus Prime is fighting, I believe it was Lockdown? Well whoever it was, it’s supposed to be really dramatic and intense, but the dialogue goes like this. Optimus says, “this is our war.” And then Lockdown says, “no, it’s my war. And I’ll win it too.” These are actual lines of dialogue from this movie! Then there’s the all around illogic of the film. I’m gonna talk about 2 or 3 scenes from this movie a little bit, but I don’t consider them spoilers because they (a) won’t ruin the movie and (b) you shouldn’t care at all about this complete pile of feces. So there’s this scene like 15 minutes into the movie where these shady government guys you don’t know too much about yet show up at Mark Wahlberg’s barn. And they’re these guys who are hunting the Autobots down and all, and they suspect that Wahlberg is hiding one. Well they take his daughter and threaten to shoot her if he doesn’t give the Autobot up. Well Wahlberg’s character seemed smart and probably knew they couldn’t just shoot her in cold blood. What happened if he just said, go ahead? Then there’s a point they actually are about to shoot her, and it’s things like that which take me out of the movie. Then there’s this other scene where Bradley is in this car and she’s about to be taken up to the enemy ship, and Mark Wahlberg says, “try kicking out the window!” And then she taps it with two fingers or something and says, “I’m trying!” I laughed at that. At least a couple friends I was there with did too. But speaking of laughter, ugh… The humor in this movie does not hit. T.J. Miller had like 2 or 3 funny lines, but as I said before, Stanley Tucci’s humor is an atrocity, and all other humor attempts or references to humor just miss the mark entirely. But on an unrelated note, even some of the effects looked horrible. Like there’s this one Transformer who’s smoking a cigar the whole movie. What?

But going back to the garbage pile script, really the story as a whole is messy and hard to follow. So Optimus Prime is a run-down, old truck one minute, then fully functional the next? Then the story just kinda proceeds on in a weird way… Now I believe that every single film has potential. I have been wrong on this only a few times before, but the general premise of a film does give it promise every time. And what would I have done here to try and make the story better? I think they should have done a storyline like The Dark Knight Returns. It could be Optimus Prime being rebuilt in that barn and we see the other Autobots on the run or being captured, and eventually Optimus gets his strength back and finds Bumblebee and some of the others and they ban together to take down Lockdown. I haven’t read the comics and it’s been a WHILE since I’ve seen the show, but I think that could be cool and even a little original?

And the runtime on this piece of crap? Dear Lord Jesus, how long was this thing? Actually, I’ll tell you. This movie was 165 minutes of a Friday night I will never get back. Dear Lord. So you know that there are usually times in movies where it goes from bad to worse? There were about 3 of those here. The first one is when the government shows up at the barn. From there, the movie goes from watchable to unwatchable. Then when they break into Stanley Tucci’s corporation, it goes from unwatchable to bad. Then when it moves to the Battle of Hong Kong, it, my friends, has gone from bad to horrendous.

As I’ve mentioned, I saw this movie with 5 of my friends, and one of them was halfway out of his seat ready to leave. We were all hanging out earlier in the day too, and one guy had to “leave before the movie”. He was probably at home laughing at us while we were having our Friday nights squandered. And the friend that dragged us all to see it, the same one that hated Edge of Tomorrow? He is now not allowed to make any life decisions EVER. I talked to him after the movie, and he at least admitted that even though he liked it, it wasn’t a good movie. He knew it was a guilty pleasure movie, and it isn’t something you could actively say is good. At least there’s that…

And the other fact about this script is that everything you see in this movie is just taken from another movie. Whether it’s the Man of Steel action, or the Man of Steel power generator, or a generically terrible government conspiracy movie, or a Roland Emmerich movie’s level of destruction (another friend and I said at the same time that one scene was taken straight from Independence Day), this movie is completely borrowed from everywhere.

But anyway guys, there’s not an ounce of this movie that I liked. Bad acting in a script that is one of the worst I have ever seen, mixed with bad directing, horribly ineffective humor, the same Michael Bay racism (there’s even a slavery joke in this one), continuous boring explosions, ripped-off plot points, bad effects and a run time that is excessive to say the least.  This is simply called a “movie” because technically, it was shot on a camera.  I’m usually a pretty nice guy who likes to cut movies or shows some slack, but I wouldn’t give this movie this rating if it didn’t deserve it. Transformers: Age of a Bad Movie, or whatever it’s called, is… a 1/5.

I’m not gonna give the movie a 2 for trying. 2’s are for movies like Blended where you can at least see the effort put in. This was just an eyesore of 165 minutes that I’ll never get back.

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Before I end, I will do a quick shoutout though. Shoutout to my local movie theater, where I only had to pay $9.50 to see this on opening day, in one of those big 499 seat, huge-screen theaters! It’s usually something excessive like $17 opening night to see Amazing Spider-Man 2, but this was great. Even they knew it wasn’t good. I also go there some Tuesdays where they do “Every Ticket is $7 All-Day”, and that’s really cool. The past 3 Tuesdays I’ve seen 3 movies really cheap. So shoutout to my local theater for being really reasonable!!

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But guys, those are my thoughts on Transformers: Age of EcSTINKtion. Did you guys see this monstrosity? If so, what did you think about? Let me know down below, and as always, thanks for reading guys.