About a year ago, while I was wandering around St James's Park, I noticed a large number of film vehicles - including a lot of cars - parked in Horse Guards Road. A quick check of Twitter (always best for figuring out what's happening in the world) told me that they were filming the latest Transformers movie.
Great, I thought. This is what everyone has been crying out for - a sequel to Transformers: Age of Extinction, that cinematic classic-in-the-making that is certain to be in everyone's all-time-list of best films.
So I wandered up to The Mall (just by Admiralty Arch) where they were filming, snapped a couple of shots (I also have some video if Michael Bay wants it for the Blu Ray extras), and thought that now I'd seen it being filmed, I should probably watch the film when it came out (like I needed an excuse).
And the film has just come out - so I went to see it.
To say that Transformers : The Last Knight descends into extreme silliness does a disservice to the previous episodes of this seemingly unending series. However, watching it is akin to reading a comic book while jacked-up on helium. Like the earlier installments, it's fast, loud, overlong and completely nonsensical. It was also entertaining, but only in a 'watch it once and never see it again' sense.
I liked the first Transformers movie - there was plenty wrong with it, but it did enough right that it's a film I'll watch again. The second managed to produce some interesting action sequences, so it's not completely without merit. Third and fourth though were like trying to watch one of Michael Bay's Transformers transform - you know there's something happening, but with all the fast edits and constant camera moving, you can't be exactly sure what it is, whether it's doing it right, and whether the end result looks right or not.
With that as a benchmark, T:TLK is a step-up from the last couple of films. It provides Laura Haddock, doing her best Lara Croft impersonation, who seemed to be a step up from some of the female characters of previous films. The camera didn't seem to be quite as interested in leering over her, and she delivers a likable performance. We also get Izabella - a girl doing typical girl things, such as repairing robots and having unrealistic adventures (read my novel if you think I'm being facetious), who gets some decent opening scenes, is then forgotten about for half of the film, and then comes back with some fairly random reason for her involvement at the end.
The attempts at humour in the film generally fall flat - the Autobots are as unfunny as ever - but Stanley Tucci's inebriated wizard is surely a cult character in the making. His performance is somewhere between awful and brilliant - in fact I think an entire spin-off film needs to be devoted to this character,
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