Transformers: Age of Extinction and the Critic-Proof Summer Movie

I’m generally pretty fond of
director Michael Bay, whose penchant for unchecked bombast can
actually be a lot of fun at times. Giant robots! Punching stuff!
And turning into dinosaurs! Who doesn’t enjoy that?

But a sense of fun is exactly what his new film,
Transformers: Age of Extinction, is missing. From
my review in today’s Washington Times:

It is sometimes said that certain massively expensive summer
movies are “critic proof.” The label, given to films unlikely to be
impacted by negative reviews, implies a form of resistance, a
defensive shell against critical judgment and thinking.

It’s useful enough for some movies, but in the case of
“Transformers: Age of Extinction,” it’s not enough.

The fourth installment in director Michael
Bay’s series about a series of shape-shifting robots does not
merely resist critical interpretation, it seems purposefully
designed to actively thwart it.

Mr. Bay’s garish, violent, incoherent, repetitive, exhausting,
and punishingly loud movie goes straight for the viewer’s lizard
brain, the part that does not think or feel, but merely reacts as
if poked repeatedly with a stick (and that’s before the robot
dinosaurs appear).

It is a movie made to tap into base, subhuman instincts. Like
the giant robots it features, it is precision-designed to crush,
kill and destroy.

In some respects, then, it merely follows in footsteps of its
predecessors. The first three Transformers films were all exercises
in unchecked cinematic excess, $200 million vehicles for playing
out adolescent adventure fantasies on the big screen.

But the first film in the series was carried out with a genuine
sense of joyful, childlike enthusiasm. There were giant robots that
transformed into cars, and explosions that looked like fireworks,
and it was awesome and silly and ridiculous and wonderful.

Yes, I know: Michael Bay demands things to be
awesome. That’s his thing. He’s good at it. But I almost wonder
if he’s getting bored of it. By the end, the movie almost becomes a
parody of a Michael Bay movie, and I got the definite sense that
Bay is growing tired of his own shtick and just trying to see what
he can get away with. 

Read the whole review
here. You can read my significantly more positive review (which
I stand by!) of Bay’s first Transformers film
here. See a page from my Age of Extinction screening
notes here.