‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ isn’t the worst film of 2014 but with an extended running time the movie drags on for far longer than it ever needed to go…
By Scott Sawitz — NerdcoreMovement.com
For a long time Michael Bay has been a pretty easy target for most frustrated cinema fanboys. He’s the root of all that is evil, or so it goes, because he’s one of the few auteurs in Hollywood who isn’t concerned with awards, prestige or even churning out high quality cinema from a critical basis on a regular basis. Bay is the cinematic anti-Christ to many film critics, and a lot of cinema goers and film fanatics, for the crime of looking at making money instead of making great art. Bay doesn’t care about film as a whole, or so the argument goes, he just churns out big dumb action movies for the sake of cashing in the desires of 13 year old boys. Whatever film that Bay does that manages to do blockbusters numbers is always used in comparison to small films that can’t find an audience, as well, as Transformers 2 was waylaid by critics for the crime of making more money than The Hurt Locker. And then something curious happened.
Bay decided to cash in all his chips and make a true crime story about bodybuilders in Miami based off a newspaper article that turned out to be his second worst grossing film with Pain & Gain. It also happened to be one of the best films of 2013 but was ignored en masse by audiences for any number of reasons.
So it’s no wonder why Bay would go back to the well with Transformers: Age of Extinction, also known as Transformers 4. People didn’t care when he tried to do something new and different, of doing a true crime story with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Mark Wahlberg. The fact that this film alone has been projected to open to $100 million domestically (or $15 million more than ‘Pain & Gain’ made total) at the box office is only more motivation for Bay to make Transformers films every year until ‘Transformers Meet Abbott and Costello’ finishes up the series.
The film takes place several years after the events of the third film and changes its focus radically. We now follow the tale from the perspective of Cade Yaeger (Mark Wahlberg). He’s a failed inventor and single father to his Tara Reid lookalike daughter (Nicola Peltz) who is scrounging around his small Texast town to repair things for cash. The government is now working to eliminate Transformers as a whole from the surface of the earth, as a CIA agent (Kelsey Grammar) with a fervent patriotic conviction to his duty has teamed up with a corporate tech guru (Stanley Tucci) to create their own Transformers under the control of the government. Throw in an intergalactic mercenary (voice of Mark Ryan) who has a weapon of mass destruction useful to both sides, and an old enemy who may be lingering around, and there’s something potentially interesting going on here.
The one thing Bay does well, perhaps going unappreciated for, is his fidelity to giving the sequels larger implications from the events of the prior films. Each film built upon the nuanced relationship the robots and the humans had, in its own way, as the devastation they caused in each film (while spectacular to watch on screen) has changed the course of human history in profound ways. Human beings have gradually changed from viewing them as protectors to nuisances to dangerous menaces deserving to be sought out and destroyed.
It’s genuinely interesting to see that Bay at least sees his universe as malleable in that regard. The big city destroying fights of the first three films have major real world consequences and Bay properly treats them as having the implications they would in real life. Bay populates his world with reminders of what has happened and his characters have idiosyncrasies that can only have developed from living in a world where death via fallout from gigantic robot battles is a realistic thing to happen to you or a loved one.
The problem with the film, the main one, is that Bay has made it so dense with storylines and characters that a near three hour running time is necessary to contain it all. And it’s a problem because Bay has no clue how to properly pace or craft a story that runs this long.
Bay is good at a handful of things as a director, the first being crafting extended action sequences that manage to suck you in. You could argue that Bay is a director whose style has been appropriated the most, as many blockbuster films of similar size tend to ape the way he does big action sequences, but Bay is a genuine master at turning mayhem & destruction into something spectacular to watch. Age of Extinction is no different in this regard as the film’s big action sequences are spectacular and worth the price of admission alone. Everything he does looks impressive and he does work with CGI that is near flawless in execution. Bay’s a genuinely good director at crafting the big action sequences that a film featuring fighting robots needs.
It’s just that for all these great action sequences the basics of telling this story, which really feels like a pair of two hour films smashed into one three hour cut, Bay’s inability to cut down the film to a reasonable thing gives it a dragging feeling anytime there isn’t an action sequence. You can forgive Bay’s inability to bring out anything besides a hammy performance from the cast, as this is Transformers film and you don’t need anything beyond “just good enough to get by,” but Bay’s inability to keep the film from blathering when it should be more streamlined is a major problem. He’s trying to condense two major storylines, of an interesting father/daughter dynamic and the creators of the Transformers sending someone to bring back their creation, into one film but doesn’t want to cut anything from the film.
This is a film that needs a judicious editor as there’s a streamlined two hour version of this film that would be near identical in content but without the needless lulls and slow points that populate this film. At two hours this would be an innocuous, perfectly acceptable waste of time. That extra 45 minutes makes it feel like 450 extra minutes. There are so many moments and scenes that work in an editing bay, and not in a theatre, that could be excised from this film and make it a bit more palpable.
‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ isn’t the worst film of the year, far from it. It’s just overlong and fairly pedestrian, eyeing mediocrity (and ticket sales) and marginally achieving it at best.
