Transformers: The Last Knight - Review

So here it is, the latest, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the final Transformers film. Now I have looked at most of the reviews and all of them basically say that this is the worst Transformers film and it is one of the worst films of the year. However, for some reason, I thought I would give this film a chance and it wasn't actually that bad. It wasn't fantastic by any means, but it wasn't as awful as everyone said it was and I actually enjoyed myself for most of it. Now, my biggest problem with the Transformers films is that the back stories always seem to contradict each other. I could buy the fact that Merlin's staff was actually a Transformers staff and I could buy the fact of why Cybertron would want to come to Earth to be rebuilt, but why in the world would you make every single famous person in history a descendant of a family that hides the Transformers for generations? Why would you have Transformers fight in World War II for the Americans and have them hate all Transformers and act like they have never seen them before in previous movies? It's questions like that that bother me and why I have never liked it when sequels try to re-write their back story. Besides that, there wasn't any offensive sexualizing of women, the dumb jokes are kept to a minimum and the Transformers action was actually comprehensible. Mark Wahlberg is serviceable as our main protagonist and the addition of the little girl gives the film actually a little bit of humanity but hands down the best part of this movie is Anthony Hopkins. If you take such an amazing well-trained actor like that and put him in your movie, he can really elevate it. He was the main reason I was watching the whole time. His side-kick Transformer, annoying. You just couldn't keep your humour out of this Michael Bay, could you? While the plot is okay, the action scenes are okay and the characters are okay, the biggest thing that is missing is that Transformers magic. What do I mean by that? Much like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise which just had their 5th entry in their franchise too, the first film was lightning in a bottle. You had characters we cared about, exciting action set-pieces and a story we wanted to see. My best way of describing this is when you hear the main theme to both series in their first entries, you get goosebumps. When you hear the main theme to both series in their 5th entries, it just feels like there is no gas left in the tank. While I did enjoy parts of this movie and it didn't make me angry like the last Transformers film, I think this is a good place to retire the Transformers series. Michael Bay, you had a good run. 10 years, 5 films, billions of dollars. Good job Mr. Bay. Now, on to better things.