Transformers: Age of Extinction - Review

Man, what a mess! This film feels like it was written by an 8-year-old. Now I can complain about the Michael Bay-isms like the sex object female character, the stupid jokes, the product placement or just the absurd running time full of explosions, but then I'll sound like a broken record. I will tell you how this film could have been fixed because I think it could have been. The biggest problem with this movie was making Mark Wahlberg's Cade Yager and his family the focus of this movie. You got me to care about Sam Witwicky and his family for, let's say two and a half movies, but you couldn't get me to care about this paper thin family. Tessa is annoying, Shane, the Irish driver in Texas has no personality whatsoever and for heaven's sake, why is T.J. Miller here and why is he making jokes about how hot Tessa is and about slavery. Yes, there is a slavery joke in a Transformers film. This is the Star Wars prequel problem where if I don't care about the main characters, then why should I be invested at all when Hong Kong is being ripped to shreds? Well, there is a saving grace and a missed opportunity in Stanley Tucci. First off, he is much more charismatic than Mark Wahlberg is and Stanley Tucci's character actually has a motivation, an arc, is overall is just a more interesting character. He is also different than the characters we are used to seeing in these Transformers films. He is making his own Transformers to sell to the United States government. I'll admit, that's kind of cool and it could have been the Jurassic Park (no dinosaur pun intended) plot where a bad Transformer goes rogue and Optimus Prime has to come back and try to save them. Forget all this "creator" Transformers crap with the extinction of the Dinosaurs and forget the Boston native in Texas and his family and forget this other Transformer who is trying to find Optimus Prime because... I honestly have no idea. There are signs of Spider-Man 3 in here with the "too many villains" scenario. If Stanley Tucci was the focus and the plot shred a bunch of its other non-sense, then all these giant action scenes may have a purpose and actually have some tension. However, as this film is right now, I don't like it. Plain and simple. If you do, great. I'm glad you like it. Just don't expect me to stay around for an entire Transformers marathon.