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Transformers: Age Of Extinction review

Check out our review of Transformers: Age Of Extinction - the fourth Transformers movie from director Michael Bay

Transformers: Age Of Extinction poster

Transformers: Age Of Extinction

Certificate: 12A

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Stanley Tucci, Kelsey Grammer

Release date: 2014

3 out of 5

3

The fourth Transformers movie from director Michael Bay is more of what we’ve come to expect – mass destruction, robot on robot fighting action and a few humans dotted around to deliver clunky lines and occasionally distract us from the CGI special effects.

Following the destruction of Chicago in the previous Transformers movie, the autobots (good machines) and decepticons (bad robots) are all being rounded up, regardless of whether they are nice or not, by grumpy CIA man Attinger (Grammer). He’s secretly being aided by an alien robot who is looking for Optimus Prime himself, but luckily Optimus has instead been found by single dad Cade (Wahlberg, nice to watch but given little to do), who with his daughter (Peltz, wearing the standard-female-in-a-Michael-Bay-movie costume of teeny shorts and tight top) and her racer boyfriend (Reynor) soon find themselves stuck in the middle trying to save the rusty old robot, and hunted by just about everybody for doing so. There’s a subplot about a millionaire (Tucci, enjoyably hamming it up) building controllable Transformers for military use using bits from super-baddie Megatron’s metal head, which you know won’t end well, and the late addition of a device that could destroy the world as we know it, but by the time all the elements have been mixed in, along with car chases, a rooftop action sequence and even dino-bots,  your brain will have gone into meltdown and you’ll only be able to drool into your popcorn as the film limps past the two hour mark.

While there are some plus points about this movie – the fact that the bland star of the previous three, Shia LaBeouf isn’t in it being a big one – there are some negatives too. If you thought part three (Dark Of The Moon) was overlong, you ain’t seen nothing yet, as this only just scrapes in at under three hours. And the much heralded dinobots don’t even turn up until the final half hour nor make much of an impression or much sense when they do (one assumes how/why they exist and what they’re all about will be the plot for the next movie).

It is all mindless action, slickly done, if you go for that sort of thing, but once again the problem here is just who Transformers is aimed at. Kids that play with the toys, know their Ratchet from their Lockdown, and watch the animated TV series tend to be aged nine and under, and while many 12A certificate films are fine for kids that age, parents should note that this movie has a lot (and we mean A LOT) of swearwords peppered throughout. Perhaps this is one for bigger boys only…

Is Transformers: Age Of Extinction suitable for kids? Here are our parents’ notes...

None.

As noted above, there is lots of bad language in the movie, so it may not be suitable for under-11s.

If you like this, why not try: Transformers, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Pacific Rim, Transformers: The Movie,