'Transformers: The Last Night' Review Roundup: Critics Slam Michael Bay In Last Franchise Film

“Transformers: The Last Knight” has finally hit theaters and fans of the franchise are overwhelmed with joy about the fifth installment in the movie franchise. While viewers flood to the theaters for a chance to watch the highly anticipated summer film, critics have already had the opportunity to view the movie and have shared their thoughts.

The film which was released on June 21, follows the story of Cade Yeager, played by Mark Wahlberg, who lives in a world in which humans are at war with the Transformers. The key to saving the world lies within the depths of the history of the Transformers on Earth.

READ: Mark Wahlberg Teases “Transformers: The Last Knight” At MTV Movie & TV Awards

While in the process of trying to complete his mission, Yeager is also tasked with bringing Optimus Prime back to the Autobots after his morality has been corrupted. With the help of several Transformers and a few humans, Cade sets out to make the world right once again.

While the film sounds and looks like a jam-packed action flick, several outlets have given the movie negative reviews and were disappointed with director Michael Bay’s work on this movie. Before heading to the theaters to watch “Transformers: The Last Knight,” check what the critics have to say about this summer film:

Director Michael Bay has finally taken the Transformers where they always should’ve been, to the Realm of the Ridiculous. Any movie based on a line of toys is bound to be silly but this may be one of the silliest films ever made. From a prologue set in the Middle Ages and robots hanging out on Cuban beaches to a wisecracking Merlin the Magician and a 700-year-old opera singing robot, this is wacky stuff. - CTV News

Robbie Collins of The Telegraph wasn’t fond of the film’s dialogue, but he did commend the actors on hitting comedic marks and was thrilled with the movie’s climactic end, giving the film four stars.

“By definition, this is the largest action set-piece Bay will ever pull off – unless in his next film he just finds two bigger planets, or throws in a moon for good measure. But the sequence, in all its literally earth-shattering preposterousness, is a cinematic experience no other filmmaker could have possibly concocted,” he wrote.

The Telegraph’s rave reviews are in stark contrast to the one given by Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, who believed that the movie didn’t deserve any stars at all.

“‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ is all kinds of awful. It’s also the worst of the series to date, which is saying something. The year is only half over, but even ‘Pirates 5,’ ‘Fifty Shades Darker,’ ‘King Arthur: Legend of the Sword’ and ‘The Mummy’ can’t rob ‘Transformers 5’ of the title as 2017’s most toxic film byproduct.”

“Bay has set a pattern that can go on poisoning the well as long this stuff turns a profit. It’s not just that he is killing the art of movies – he’s killing the joy of movies as well. His cynical, untouched-by-human-hands approach to filmmaking is that a sucker is born every minute and he's here to serve. My dream is that this whole tapped-out robo series will transform into a turd and audiences will have the good sense to flush it,” Travers wrote.

All the best moments in the movie—pure images, devoid of symbol and, for that matter, nearly empty of sense—go by too fast, are held too briefly, are developed too little. Bay’s highest inspirations are those of a virtually experimental filmmaker of pure sensation; the rush of sensation is also a temptation for experimental filmmakers who often don’t keep their own images onscreen very long (cf. Stan Brakhage). The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power. If Steven Spielberg is the filmmaker without an id, Bay is a cinematic id that gets held in check by the tight superego of script and editing—a free spirit that is anchored to Earth by a pile of junk. In finding his career, he may have missed his calling. -The New Yorker

The Wrap was also unforgiving with the choice of direction for the film calling “Transformers: The Last Night” Bay’s “latest hot mess.” However, critic Alonso Duralde noted that the film was slightly less messy compared to the director’s other works.

“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,” Duralde wrote.

READ: 3 things learned from the “Transformers: The Last Knight” Trailer

“If the action in the first two ‘Transformers’ movies was done in by the incompetence of its lensing and editing, and the scenes of explosions, car chases, narrow escapes and citywide destruction in the following two features somewhat improved by offering at least a few genuine daring thrills, then the likeminded action in ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ is so ceaselessly uncreative and ineffectual it's as if they do not exist at all. A collection of quick shots strung aimlessly together does not a tightly constructed or memorable sequence make, and it helps matters none that Bay seems to have entirely checked out. As astronomically expensive and enormous in scope as this film is, there is no excuse for a filmmaker to stop trying and to clearly not even care, but all evidence in the finished product suggests these very things to be true. -The Film File

“Five films deep into the series, for Michael Bay, ‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ is the bombastic filmmaker’s bon voyage to the franchise and he’s looking to go out on top, bro. However, obviously not registering restraint, Bay also fails to understand the meaning of last call. So, for his grand, overstuffed sendoff the director goes for broke and detonates the biggest fireworks spectacle of his career with characteristic excessive force. Bayhem reigns supreme,” Rodrigo Perez of The Playlist wrote. Despite being impressed by the action sequences, Perez stated that the film was “nonsensically overwrought.”