Transformers: The Last Knight Review Round-Up

The Hollywood Reporter

"The good news about the latest Transformers movie is that — spoiler alert! — the world gets saved at the conclusion. The bad news is that it leaves the opportunity for more Transformers movies.

This profitable franchise has not exactly enjoyed critical praise since its first installment in 2007, and Transformers: The Last Knight is unlikely to change that. But bad reviews are unlikely to dissuade the series' fans, who enjoy seeing lots of things blown up, with director Michael Bay once again happy to oblige. That the film required no less than six editors doesn't come as a surprise."

Variety

"The "Transformers" films, as befitting a series spun out of a Hasbro monster-truck toy system designed to connect with the inner worldview of nine-year-olds, started off, in 2007, as exceedingly wholesome. What a difference a decade of baroquely semi-coherent robot-fury overkill makes! "Transformers: The Last Knight," the fifth film in the hugely popular, critically reviled franchise (has there ever been a movie series that put the red state/blue state divide between audiences and reviewers like this one does?), is also the most extravagantly brutish and lurid. There's still a PG-13 gee-whiz-ness to the proceedings, but the towering, swivel-socketed machine men now seem like they've been around the block a few times, complete with pit stops at the race track and dive bars."

Entertainment Weekly

"Monster metal, mass destruction, Anthony Hopkins saying "dude." This is your brain on Michael Bay—a cortex scramble so amped on pyro and noise and brawling cyborgs it can only process what's happening on screen in onomatopoeia: Clang! Pew-pew! Kablooey! (Which, to be fair, does cover about 80 percent of the script.)

Mark Wahlberg returns as Cade Yeager, the Texas inventor who came to the Autobots' aid in 2014's Transformers: Age of ­Extinction, and wore a waffle-knit henley so well that he has now been anointed the savior of all mankind—a crucial link between the friendly machines who just want to get back to their home planet and the malicious-slash-misguided earthlings who want to crush them into junkyard-cube oblivion."

Forbes

"Transformers: The Last Knight opens tonight, actually right as this is publishing if you're on the East Coast and got a ticket to Paramount's "Prime Time Tuesday" event. But yeah, Michael Bay has returned for a fifth and allegedly final Transformers movie. And, this time around, all eyes are on China. We know this fifth film isn't going to come anywhere near the $300-$400 million domestic totals of the first three pictures, and the $240m finish of Age of Extinction in June of 2011 would be a near-miracle. But the last film made over $322m in China alone, which helped pushed the picture past the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office. By the way, that was the last time a movie not released by Walt Disney or Universal/Comcast Corp. crossed said milestone. So even with declining domestic interest, the hope is that China still cares enough to compensate for the downturns elsewhere."

The Wrap

"There are a few action sequences of shocking coherence in "Transformers: The Last Knight," the fifth of Michael Bay's clang-clang-clang-went-the-robot adventures, but fear not, fans of the franchise: if you're here for the director's trademark chaos editing (where fights go from points A to D to Q), toxic masculinity (and female objectification), comedy scenes rendered tragic (and vice versa), and general full-volume confusion, you'll get all those things in abundance. In a way, the film plays like a greatest-hits collection of the worst films so far of Summer 2017, from an appearance by the Knights of the Round Table that calls to mind "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword," the leaden comedy and leering courtship of "Baywatch" and the general "Why are we in England again?"-ness of "The Mummy.""

Deadline

"Wednesday is the first official day of summer, which means it is time for more Transformers — just what you have been asking for, right? It actually has been three years since the fourth installment of the Paramount/Hasbro/Michael Bay goldmine, and though Bay once swore he would quit after that one (Age Of Extinction), he couldn't stay away from his toys. So the filmmaker is back behind the camera once again for The Last Knight, which is just as big, bloated and long (at 2 1/2 hours) as all that have come before it. But as I say in my video review above, once it calms down a little after the humans-vs.-Transformers battle that opens the film, it is blessed to have Anthony Hopkins back to light this edition up, adding dignity, credibility, wit and his regal presence to make this all tolerable."

Empire

"Believe it or not, Transformers, in its live action movie iteration, is now ten years old. For its first hour at least, there was something human, relatable and — whisper it — charming in Michael Bay's original, a boy (Shia LaBeouf) who loved his car (Bumblebee) and wanted the unattainable girl (Megan Fox). Now fifth time out, the knack of coming up with anything so simple and likeable has eluded Bay. As in Revenge of The Fallen, Dark of The Moon and Age of Extinction, The Last Knight is bogged down in backstory, lacks a real feel for its characters and still can't find a way to make its robot-on-robot action exhilarating. The first project to emerge from the Transformers writers room (where it is permanently twilight) The Last Knight starts well in the Dark Ages. After fireballs wittily fly over the Paramount mountain, Bay mounts a full-on Arthurian battle far more exciting than Guy Ritchie's, featuring trebuchets, knights blasted sky-high into the air and a three-headed mechanical dragon that lays waste to an entire battlefield."

We Got This Covered

"Transformers: The Last Knight is a tiresome mix of self-aware silliness and Budweiser-branded apocalypse porn, but compared to Michael Bay's previous Hasbrosploitations, at least this one is – dare I say – momentarily fun? Not enough to avoid becoming a dizzy mecha-mess of metallic chaos, mind you. Let's be realistic. Early predictions of a 3:20 length only missed by about 50-or-so minutes, sticking to the franchise's boorish signatures. First it's men against bots, then bots against bots, then Medieval bots against newer bots, then Earth against Cybertron (like, the planets themselves) – be still, my swirling head. Focus on the blatant Suicide Squad ripoff and dogpiled sexual humor. Maybe that will distract from from the distractions themselves."

IGN

"A film primarily about good robots fighting naughty robots has no business being two hours and twenty-eight minutes long. Worse, Transformers: The Last Knight is so convoluted and drawn-out that it feels like double that amount of time has passed. Just like the rest of the series, Michael Bay's fifth Transformers film sees the Autobots (good) fight the Decepticons (naughty) for little more reason than that's simply what they do. And, just like the rest, it tries to crowbar Transformers lore into human history and legends, almost to the point where it seems like Earth belongs more to these big old cars with faces than to us. This time around it's King Arthur and the Crusades, where we see that Merlin (played by a particularly silly Stanley Tucci) was given a magic staff by a Transformer, and that staff is now the key to saving the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron."

Hey U Guys

"It's been a decade since the first entry into the Transformers cinematic franchise came into the hearts of the billions of fans it has accrued and like the giant robots that populate the film, the series has become a monolithic symbol of the ultimate summer blockbuster ever since. But ten years on does The Last Knight bring us full circle to the first film and give us a treat that's most stimulating and visually impressive?

Well, for the first hour or so, its actual all rather good fun. It's the typical Bay-hem you would expect but there is some actual story work going on with some characters, new and old, that make for some compelling moments – the world has disowned the Transformers since Optimus Prime's defeat at the end of Age of Extinction. Cade Yeager (Wahlberg) has become an outlaw, heading off the grid leaving his daughter in the "real world", instead rallying the remaining Autobots to keep them out of the hands of the Government's new task force. But new clues about the of the robots in disguise have been unlocked, leading back to the Knights of the Round Table, King Arthur and Merlin (a hilarious cameo by Stanley Tucci) – secrets that eccentric British dignitary Sir Edmund Burton (Hopkins) and local historian Victoria Wembley (Haddock) may be able to help crack."