The 2/5 star-est franchise currently going in Hollywood rumbles along with its seventh entry, Transformers Rise of the Beasts, a big, loud, and nonsensical bridging of the gap between the friendlier ‘80s-set Bumblebee and the crass carnage of the Bayhem era that throws just about enough stuff at the walls that some of it sticks. It hardly escapes its origin as a cacophonous toy commercial (especially with the frequent and egregiously obvious moments of Brand Synergy product placement), but there’s just about enough fun-ish stuff to avoid sinking into the true blockbuster doldrums of, say, last year’s Jurassic World Dominion.
Moving the action to the ‘90s – an era that new director Steven Caple Jr doesn’t do much with other than cribbing all the decade’s most famous hip-hop tracks – Rise of the Beasts sort-of continues the story of Bumblebee, the friendliest of the Autobots, but mostly goes its own way. This means new robots, new humans, and a new MacGuffin, the truly uninspired ‘TransWarp Key’, a magical teleportation gizmo that will summon planet-destroying robot Unicron (the role that Orson Welles played back in the ‘80s cartoon) to Earth.
Protecting this device are the usual suspects of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), alongside new Transformers like the totally tubular rad dude Mirage (Pete Davidson), who can produce holograms of himself, and the new breed of robots known as Maximals. Led by, ahem, Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), a giant metal gorilla, these guys turn into animals rather than cars, joining forces with the Autobots on Earth to stop the coming of Unicron and destroy his evil henchman Scourge (Peter Dinklage).
If this all sounds like complete gibberish, it is just as ridiculous on screen as it is on paper, and the first third of Rise of the Beasts is *rough*, full of leaden exposition from Joby Harold’s script and hard-to-follow action sequences. It doesn’t help that the human side of things has become even more forgettable than in the Bayhem era, with new leads in the form of financially-troubled ex-soldier Noah (Anthony Ramos) and genius historian Elena (Dominique Fishback) barely registering. In fact, even for this robot-focused franchised, there are shockingly few named humans here, making its world seem rather empty even as armies of robo-animals storm across the screen.
Things do pick up considerably as we get towards the end though, and there is something satisfying in the visually dull but ambitiously-scaled final grand battle sequence – Peter Cullen might well be playing the role of Optimus in his sleep at this point, but his voice work is still undeniably commanding. A final sequel-tease stinger almost re-sinks the film as a whole, but the finale hits just enough of the right beats to leave you on a relative high. Rise of the Beasts is not much better or much worse than the Bay stuff – it’s certainly less crude, but also, for the same reasons, much less distinctive (right down to the generic MCU ‘big beam in the sky’ showdown), keeping the series hard to love, but also hard to feel strongly enough about to really dislike.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 