'Transformers: The Last Knight' Review: Before you watch prepare yourself for a Michael Bay Sh**fest!

4/10
Directed by Michael bay

Featuring Mark Wahlberg returning from Age of Extinction, with Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, and Glenn Morshower all reprising their roles from the first three films, with Laura Haddock and Anthony Hopkins both joining the cast.

Director Michael Bay's latest big-budgetTransformers sequel is completely unnecessary, utterly unintelligible, and overwhelmingly unsatisfying unless your only expectation is more explosions and battles and no story. Transformers: The Last Knight totally wastes the considerable talent of Academy Award winner Hopkins, who's reduced to a simple stereotype of a rich English lord who bosses around his persnickety robot butler, Cogman (aptly voiced by Jim Carter of Downton Abbey), and must inform others about his secret society. Plus, the dialog is insipid (much is made of Sir Edmund saying "dude"), and the plot is simultaneously confusing and uninteresting. Even the addition of Izabella (Isabela Moner), a new orphan character, fizzles; she starts off with potential but ultimately has little to do other than make iffy decisions and stand in as a spunky kid for Cade to add to his family.

Viewers familiar with Bay's movies know what to expect, but this is obviously still a disappointment. The best part of these movies has always been the Transformers themselves, and this installment veers in favor of far too much (poorly written) human interaction instead. Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) isn't even able to save things because he's evil for most of the story. Given everything that's wrong with this Transformers installment, there is a small silver lining -- at two and a half hours, it's 15 minutes shorter than Transformers: Age of Extinction. But that still makes it nearly 45 minutes too long. The cringe-inducing, eye-rolling worst part is that, as the end makes clear, this isn't even the end of the Transformers movies.