Despite all its spectacle, 'Transformers: The Last Knight (2017)' is simply completely mind-and-arse-numbingly boring. It's an utter chore to sit through from beginning to long-awaited end. It's also the kind of self-indulgent trite that goes in one ear and straight out of the other. Honestly, I felt as though I'd been sat in the cinema for years, never mind the already far too long two-and-a-half hours I actually had to endure this for. Not a single frame provided even a morsel of entertainment - which is weird because, for all intents and purposes, the admittedly impressive visual effects should've at least granted me some brief form of passive enjoyment during one of the over-blown action set-pieces. Yet, the takeaway I have from the picture is this: only Michael Bay (and his team, of course) could make something as inherently exciting as giant robots battling one another so painfully and utterly dull. 3/10.

King Arthur's wizard Merlin allied with Transformers to bring a powerful staff. In the present, an international force has been formed to battle the Transformers. In a devastated Chicago, Izabella and her fellow street kids work to save the newly arriving Transformers. They are joined by Bumblebee and Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) who has been hiding his Transformers in his junk yard. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime finds the Transformer homeworld Cybertron in ruins. Quintessa rules Cybertron and takes control of Optimus Prime on the way to Earth to retrieve her staff. Yeager and his group is recruited by Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) who reveals the secret history of the Transformers and that professor Viviane Wembly is a descendant of Merlin.

So... that happened. It is everything Michael Bay. It has plenty of explosions, slow-motion action, hot babe, and big CGI set pieces. I'm willing to live with all that. It could be mind-numbing popcorn fun. There's nothing wrong with that. There is simply too much with the plot for this type of movie. Then there is the overall Michael Bay directions. His noisy muddled messy style is getting annoying. The historical Transformers leave me scratching my head. It is chaos in action and in story execution.

THE LAST KNIGHT is to date the most recent of the TRANSFORMERS franchise, excluding the BUMBLEBEE spin-off. It manages to be better than the original trilogy thanks to a shift away from lame comedy and juvenile hijinks towards a greater focus on epic-scale action a la the Marvel Universe. This time around, there's some half-hearted back story which seeks to tie the Arthurian legend into the Transformers universe (it never really works),which leads to the usual globetrotting and interplanetary adventures. Mark Wahlberg is on autopilot and supported by an unenthusiastic cast, with the exception of Anthony Hopkins, whose character seems to be exhibiting symptoms of early onset dementia. The voice cast (Buscemi, Goodman, Watanabe, etc.) is more interesting than the human cast. As usual, the saving grace are the special effects, which are exemplary and deliver CGI action which is all epic spectacle with barely time to draw breath.