Cade refuses to betray Optimus and manages to escape with Optimus, his sidekick friend Lucas Flannery (T.J. Miller), teen daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz - all grown up now since The Last Airbender and sporting blond hair) and her boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor).
Meanwhile, rogue CIA bigshot Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer - surprisingly convincing as a bad guy considering his earlier Frasier incarnation) is in league with Decepticon bounty hunter Lockdown. Lockdown hunts down Autobots and sends them to evil industrialist Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci - the John Turturro equivalent) for reverse engineering.
Optimus rallies the remaining surviving Autobots and Cade spies on the government agents who are chasing them. He finds out that Joyce is making Transformers, including one based on Megatron.
Things quickly escalate and the good guys find themselves fighting the bad guys and causing massive amounts of mayhem. First in Chicago, and then in Hong Kong.
***
Transformers 4 is an interesting attempt to start a new trilogy of movies, with a new set of human companions. Fan favorites Optimus Prime and Bumblebee are back but the Witwickys (including no no no no no no Sam - Shia LaBeouf) are nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, missing in action is the US military, and that makes all the difference.
It's only with Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson missing, that you realize how much they, and US military hardware, meant to the franchise. Okay, I'm a neocon, but I think the average cinema-goer will agree. Without the oomph and firepower of the US military in the background, Age of Extinction feels decidely like a smaller movie.
It suffers from the same internationalization that afflicted G.I. Joe. Michael Bay is no longer proud to be American. It is Beijing that scrambles fighter jets to protect Hong Kong. Yes, the ChiComs are now one of the good guys. Michael Bay doesn't go all the way though - the Chinese fighters are only seen in the distance, in the background, and don't take part in the fight.
Of course, all this is to cater to the large mainland China market. With Li Bing Bing (Ada Wong in Resident Evil: Retribution) playing Fan Bing Bing's role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, as the token Chinese to draw in the Chinese audience.
The movie starts of well enough, in a classic Michael Bay sun-drenched photogenic rural paradise. Cade and his daughter are nicely introduced to the audience, without it feeling like boring exposition.
The action follows quickly, and killing off the comedic sidekick early in the movie, was an impressive move. Which I thought signified an edgier Transformers. Unfortunately Age of Extinction actually ends up being goofier.
The first trilogy managed to make you forget that Transformers was originally a kiddie cartoon. Age of Extinction has Lockdown flying around in a spaceship, making me think of Gatchaman and other kiddie shows.
The Dinobots are a bust, serving only as eye candy and not adding much drama to the story. (I was complaining about the movie to a friend but he wouldn't listen, going wild over the prospect of seeing Grimlock - the Dinobot leader.) Okay, the monster Decepticon snake in the third movie was also eye candy, but that was so cool.
Age of Extinction also makes the Joel Schumacher Batman mistake of having two bad guys - Lockdown and a revived Megatron. This splits our attention, diluting the menace from each bad guy.
Character development is poor, even by Michael Bay standards. He has managed to shake off his old habit of having two story tracks - the cutesy Witwicky track for character development, plus the main Transformers action track. You can advance the plot and reveal character at the same time. That's the good news.
The bad news is that he (and writer Ehren Kruger who worked on the 2nd and 3rd movies) doesn't do much with the opportunity. Mark Wahlberg is good as Cade, drawing the audience into his world. But Wahlberg can do that with any script.
Optimus Prime is disappointing. He does his normal speechifying about honour and loyalty, but strangely seems to have forgotten the humans that worked with him in the past. He doesn't try to contact his old pals, doesn't even mention them. He ends up sounding like, yup, a robot.
Stanley Tucci is fun to watch as the evil industrialist. He's obviously being set up as a John Turturro replacement - bad guy turned comedic sidekick. But minor characters such as his employee Darcy Tirrel (Sophia Myles - Tristan and Isolde) and Tessa's boyfriend Shane Dyson (Jack Reynor) seem superfluous. We'll probably see more of them in the next movie.
Nicola Peltz is the prettiest of all the Transformers girls (I didn't see anything in Megan Fox), but she's supposed to be 17 years old in the movie, giving male audiences a guilty conscience for lusting over jailbait. Not that she's all that hot. I do not share Michael Bay's taste in women.
Age of Extinction gets a 6.9/10 from viewers on IMDB, and an expectedly low 17/100 from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes. This time, I agree with the critics.
