Culture

Rating: F

Since 2007, the Transformers franchise has gotten progressively more offensive in every way: offensive to your senses, offensive to your sensibilities, and offensive to your intelligence. Transformers: Age of Extinction is the culmination of those cinematic sins; making it one of the worst films I have ever seen.

Let’s start with the script. It jumps back and forth between a lazy attempt at a plot, which really just acts as a platform for Bay-style action-carnage, and what I struggle to describe as “dialogue.” Never in all my life have I heard such hackneyed dialogue and character development. Characters constantly spout painfully clichéd exposition and vomit-inducing attempts at playful humour in equal measure. This is made even worse by the fact that there doesn’t exist a likeable character in the whole movie, and when one does start to be vaguely likeable they are quickly killed-off. Although, calling the cardboard cut-out clichés of this movie “characters” is probably a bit of a stretch in itself. To make matters even worse, all of this is coated with an utterly disgusting and totally unabashed level of sexism and racism that sticks to every moment.

If you can make it through the sections where characters talk at each other to no effect, then you will be treated to some action that only Bay could think was appropriate in its intensity and scale. To be fair, the first five minutes of this action is certainly entertaining, but it never stops, and after three hours you’ll want to tear your eyes out rather than endure one more barrage of explosions. And that’s all you’ll get. For three hours, like the worst game of ping-pong there’s ever been, the movie volleys from the worst characters and dialogue there has ever been, to the most gratuitous and unnecessary level of action there has ever been allowed.

Transformers: Age of Extinction boasts some amazing talent, including Kelsey Grammer, TJ Miller, Stanley Tucci and John Goodman. But even these great actors could not polish the sloppiest turd that Hollywood has ever shat out.

I would happily bleach my eyes if it could rid me of my time with this monstrosity. All I can do is warn you not to waste your time, money, and brain cells on what is hopefully the worst movie of this year, and possibly the worst movie ever created.