Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS
Over the course of four followups, Michael Bay set the bar for Transformers sequels so staggeringly low that it's almost sky-high praise to say that the series' two more recent prequels, neither of which Bay directed, aren't all that bad.
Bay is still credited as a producer, and you can sense his distinctively noxious imprint all over the place: in the movies' laughable portentousness; in their godawful jokes; it their climaxes that are little more than CGI metal endlessly crashing into other forms of CGI metal. But Travis Knight's 2018 Bumblebee, when it wasn't completely beholden to clang-and-boom formula, boasted some relaxed wit, a largely casual 1987 vibe, a killer soundtrack, and a terrifically teen-angsty performance by Hailee Steinfeld; had the late John Hughes, at gunpoint, been forced to shepherd a Transformers flick, this might've been the result. And while Steven Caple Jr.'s new Transformers: Rise of the Beasts isn't anything that will be remembered years, months, or even weeks down the line, the film, like Bumblebee, does display a moderate interest in humans, and the requisite grandiosity is tempered by … . Not wit, exactly, but something that suggests that more than five minutes' worth of thought went into its design. Caple's outing is just as stupid as any of the Transformers. Yet it's a rare one that manages to be coherent 90 percent of the time, and it's nearly a half-hour shorter than any of Bay's odious offerings, which is a thunderous perk of its own.
In this latest Transformers installment, the (Earth) year is 1994, giving the five Rise of the Beast screenwriters an opportunity to contribute one or two (lame) era-specific gags apiece. The plot is your standard world-ending, utterly meaningless rigamarole, with the heroic Autobots battling the evil Terrorcons for possession of a glowing thingamajig that will enable the planet-sized baddie Unicron to eat the galaxy, or something. It's the unanticipated involvement of two Brooklyn-ites, however, that makes this a conceit almost worth caring about. One of those flesh-and-blood beings is Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), a financially strapped military vet who stumbles upon his first Transformer when coerced into boosting a sentient Porsche. The other is Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), a presumably meagerly paid museum intern who accidentally discovers the glowing thingamajig that the Autobots and Terrorcons are seeking. Big-budget destruction ensues. So do pseudo-Shakespearean pronouncements and corny gags. Our good and bad guys travel to Peru. Metallic gorillas, falcons, and cheetahs are involved. Ramos and Fishback do their best to convince us that the entirety of their months-long filming experience was not spent on a soundstage surrounded by green-screen. You know. The usual.
All told, I'm not sure that Rise of the Beasts will leave any dyed-in-the-wool Transformers fan completely satisfied. Wretched though Bay's sequels are (and I actually enjoyed his 2007 “original”), they generally manage to provide at least one legitimately breathtaking set piece per film, and despite this entry's planet-devourer Unicron and shape-shifting jungle dwellers, I can't, as of this writing, recall the specifics of a single action sequence not two hours after leaving my screening. While the mayhem is typically frenetic and bone-shakingly loud, it isn't cleverly conceived, and with Ramos and Fishback the sole humans in sight for more than half the movie's length, there isn't enough performance variety to register the enormity of what certain triumphs and setbacks might mean. Because the Transformers themselves are incapable of registering any emotion beyond the ones we occasionally glean from an arched eyebrow or robotic line reading or composer Jorgnic Bontemps' aggressively manipulative score, these gifted, hard-working actors are consigned to carrying an awful lot of empathetic weight on their shoulders, and it winds up crushing them. (I absolutely don't want to return to the days of Stanley Tucci pathetically sucking on a Chinese juice box, but these things used to have more than two solid actors supporting them.)
If, however, you're not a dyed-in-the-wool Transformers fan, there just might be enough here to distract you into thinking that, every so often, you're having fun. At the very least, unlike in previous Transformers, you won't feel like a dimwit for not comprehending a narrative that your six-year-old appears to have no trouble following. (Regarding the glowing thingamajig: Noah wants to destroy it because its presence could lead to the demolition of Earth; metallic leader Optimus Prime wants to possess it so the Transformers can return to their home planet; Unicron wants it because the creature's stomach is growling.) As opposed to one of Bay's sequels, Caple's offering actually makes a lick of geographic sense; you aren't left asking such niggling questions as “Where are we?” and “How did we get here?” and “Why is the sun shining when it's 10 p.m. and we aren't in Alaska?” The transformative effects, though mostly tired by now, are still moderately amusing in practice. So are the bits involving the robots' accidental demolition of Earth objects – though I did giggle, inappropriately, when Noah worried that the sound of a newly crushed care might wake his mom … a noise that should've woken half the boroughs of New York.
Plus, for those who love playing the game – one usually restricted to animated family comedies – of “Guess That Celebrity Voice!”, Rise of the Beasts is a veritable treasure trove. I had no trouble recognizing Pete Davidson, who voices the Porsche Mirage and sounds more alert and intent-driven than usual, even if his lines never approach what the comedian deliver in a subpar SNL sketch. Peter Cullen, as ever, voices the notably humorless Optimus Prime, and is actually allowed a semi-decent gag about not letting Bumblebee attend any more drive-in movies. But it wasn't until perusing Wikipedia that I was able to belatedly recognize the vocal contributions of Peter Dinklage, Colman Domingo, and Ron Perlman. And while I initially mourned the obvious participation of Michelle Yeoh, I did remember that hers wasn't quite the biggest comedown from an Oscar-winning role to her big-screen return in cinematic history. Yeoh may be “playing” a robotic falcon after her Everything Everywhere All at Once triumph, but at least she's not Shirley MacLaine following Terms of Endearment with Cannonball Run II.
Is Transformers: Rise of the Beasts “good”? Not by a long shot. Is it, however, good-enough as a summertime placeholder in the week between the brilliance of Spider-Man: Across the Universe and the hoped-for fun of DC's The Flash and Pixar's Elemental? Absolutely. Viewers who feel constitutionally impelled to catch one blockbuster per week between May and mid-August should have no problem with it. Viewers professionally obligated to do the same might, to their surprise, have little problem, either.
