'Transformers' stomps on coherence

Another helping of chaotic action from director Michael Bay.

It's fairly common for fantasy movies to ponder the imminent destruction of the Earth and all its inhabitants. Why we need outside (often alien) help to accomplish such devastation puzzles me. We seem to be doing a pretty good job of wrecking the planet ourselves.

Still, it's no surprise that Transformers: The Last Knight again puts the planet under extreme threat. Unfortunately, the movie -- directed by Michael Bay -- misses the point: We all probably should be wondering about the durability of a culture that has now produced its fifth movie based on a line of toys.

I'd like to tell you more about Last Knight, but that won't be easy because the plot stumbles its way through a variety of set pieces that span the movie's taxing two-and-a-half hour length.

If noise were art, Bay would be the Leonardo Da Vinci of movies. He specializes in a brand of visual and aural overstatement that can turn images into a form of cinematic shrapnel.

Bay tries to expand the series' reach by beginning in the Dark Ages, a time when knights fought with heavy swords and dodged streaking fireballs that were catapulted in their direction.

Having already been trashed in another summer movie, King Arthur returns to fight off a barbarous horde. On the verge of being decimated, the Knights of the Round Table only can be saved by Merlin (Stanley Tucci). Tipsy from alcohol in this telling, the fabled magician has a staff that can summon transformers to help vanquish the forces of evil -- or some such.

Don't hold me to every detail in this review because attempting to follow a movie as scattered as Last Knight can feel discombobulating, like trying to balance your checkbook while riding a rollercoaster.

After its Medieval prolog, the movie leaps ahead 1,600 years. The Earth faces grave danger. Among other things, savior robot Optimus Prime has returned to his home planet of Cybertron to search for his maker. Once he arrives home, Prime discovers that Cybertron has fallen on hard times. According to a sorceress named Quintessa, Cybertron only can be saved by sucking the life out of Earth.

If your head doesn't hurt by now, keep reading. If you'd rather stop and do something more constructive (rearrange your sock drawer, say), you have my blessing.

As part of its metallic furor, Last Knight also tells us that the US military has declared war on all robots. Not so fast, says Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), an inventor who remains loyal to his robot allies. Cade befriends Autobots, helpful to humans, as opposed to Decepticons, not helpful to humans.

Isabela Moner plays a young woman who also loves Autobots. She becomes an occasional tag-along partner for Wahlberg's Cade. She also drops out of the movie for extended periods.

I'll spare you a guided tour of the Transformer universe. Know, though, that about half way through, Wahlberg -- more or less the movie's lead -- joins forces with a British character named Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock). She's a Medievalist who knows how to recover Merlin's staff, which holds the key to ... well ... something or other.

Did I mention that there's also a talisman with mystical properties? Talismans are always helpful in movies because just about everyone wants to get hold of one.

The movie makes room for an extended appearance by the estimable Sir Anthony Hopkins. He portrays Sir Edmund Burton, an overly demonstrative nobleman who eventually tells us that Wahlberg's character is "the last knight" of the title.

I have to admit that the movie's final act contains some decent pulp imagery involving an attack on the Earth by what looks like a giant coral reef.

Every now and again, John Turturro, a refugee from the previous movies, makes a cameo appearance from Cuba, where his character presently is located. Turturro could be the first actor ever to have to make phone calls (really) to the main plot in order to make his presence felt.

There's also a small robot that seems to be a dilapidated, trash-can cousin of R2-D2. A late-picture underwater, submarine sequence that arrives after the movie already has sunk.

Attempts at humor are so ham-handed that they're easy to spot amid all the flying debris.

Bay doesn't whip up many edge-of-the-seat moments. Maybe that's because it's difficult to generate real suspense when the series -- like this movie -- feels as if it never will end.

Another 'Transformers' stomps into theaters

There's a new cast, but the approach is still metal-on-metal.

No point blaming director Michael Bay for trying to retool his Transformers franchise with a new cast, a ton of blurry action and a carload of unimaginative plotting.

And let's give some credit where it's due: Bay is master when it comes to creating imagery of destruction or utilizing CGI technology to transform his Autobots from cars into mega-robots. A shot of vast spacecraft hovering over Hong Kong like a giant, dark-winged bird shivers with menace.

That's right. Give Bay props for unashamed bravado and a reasonably astute understanding of his audience.

Which brings me to my point: It's not Bay we should fret over, but an audience that's willing to forgive narrative lapses, silly stories, action sequences in which it's not always possible to tell who's fighting whom and a tendency to equate loud noise with drama.

In this helping -- set two years after Transformers: Dark of the Moon -- Bay continues in customary fashion: He doesn't so much build toward a climax as leap into it, something like an eager kid cannonballing into a swimming pool. And when he does cook up a great image, he tends to repeat it.

Transformers: Age of Extinction jettisons Shia LaBeouf, and brings a new cast on-line.

No stranger to big-screen combat, Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yaeger, a Texas widower and inventor who lives with his teen-age daughter (Nicola Peltz). Dad's not having much success as an inventor, but don't worry: Father and daughter quickly are caught up in trying to help robot Optimus Prime reassert himself after being severely damaged and winding up in Cade's workshop.

Jack Reynor joins this chaotic mission. He plays Cade's daughter's boyfriend, a character who gives Wahlberg an opportunity to deliver cliched fatherly dialogue about his daughter's budding womanhood.

Stanley Tucci turns up as the head of a company that's trying to manufacture its own Autobots, and a depressed-looking Kelsey Grammer plays a CIA agent, a character who helps make government an easy target of audience mistrust and scorn.

Bingbing Li portrays one of Tucci's employees when the story shifts to Beijing en route to Hong Kong, where it concludes and concludes and then concludes some more.

But who really cares about the actors or even about the fate of humanity? The Transformer series belongs to the giant alien robots, who are beginning to make discoveries about themselves and who, it's suggested, might take over the entire story should another sequel follow.

No point rattling on. I saw the movie in IMAX and 3-D, which certainly aided Bay's efforts to present everything on a gargantuan scale.

As for Bay? He seems to hellbent not only on giving audiences what they want but on giving them so much of what they want, they'll be reduced to insensibility. Many people evidently consider this fun.

A transformed Michael Bay? Hmm...

Violence sometimes trumps comedy in Pain & Gain.
As it happens, I'm writing this review in Krakow, while working on a film project. Poland, a land rich in both painful history and cultural gain, seems an odd place to be reviewing Michael Bay's dramatically hyperventilated Pain & Gain, but that's the situation in which I find myself.

I suppose it's not entirely inappropriate. If you follow a diagonal line from the National Museum in Krakow to an opposing street corner, you'll run smack into a colossus of a billboard advertising Tom Cruise's Oblivion. That billboard, I suppose, underscores the oft-made but still unsettling point: American movie culture is ubiquitous.

So, Pain & Gain ...

Basing his movie on an improbable but true story, Bay detours from the crash & smash style he brought to movies such as Transformers, forsaking massive explosions for a hyped-up look at low-level Florida thugs who cook up a kidnapping scheme.

In many ways, Pain & Gain is an odd, even bizarre hybrid -- part comedy, part display of shocking violence and part satire about the distorting powers of the American dream.

Despite its multiple ambitions, the movie works best as a comedy about dopey, violent hoodlums who are too dumb to achieve their felonious ambitions. Bay tries to give the violence as much twisted humor as possible, serving up jolts that cause us to wince even as we chuckle.

There's a fine line here, of course, and Bay sometimes crosses it. Too much vividly displayed violence can (and sometimes does) steamroll the movie's comic elements.

Muscularity, of course, is what Bay's after with this story about body builders gone terribly wrong. Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a weight lifter who works as a trainer at Miami's Sun Gym. The time: the 1990s.

Fearing that he's stuck in a dead-end life, Lugo attends a self-help seminar. He decides that he should be a doer. For Lugo, this means hatching a scheme to kidnap a successful businessman (Tony Shalhoub).

Lugo recruits two cohorts (Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson) to carry out his ill-conceived criminal plans. He decides to hold Shalhoub's Victor Kershaw as a prisoner, until Kershaw signs over all his property and wealth to Lugo.

This trio of IQ-deprived felons doesn't count on Kershaw's powers of resistance. The victim refuses to acquiesce. Lugo & company then proceed with a variety of crudely conceived tortures.

To say that these guys are ham-handed gives them more credit than they deserve. They're precisely the kind of bungling fools one used to find in old Ealing Studio comedies -- with one exception: They're in a Michael Bay movie that seems intent on channeling some of Quentin Tarantino's taste for irony-laced violence.

Each of the thugs represents a different brand of self-deception. Lugo comes off a flexed muscle of a man whose brawn and ambition exceed his brain power and skill. Since his release from prison, Johnson's Paul Doyle has been struggling to give up a life of sex, drugs and crime. Despite a new-found love for Jesus, Paul has trouble staying a straight and narrow course. Mackie portrays Adrian Doorbal, a young man whose steroid abuse has left him buffed but impotent.

The supporting cast adds additional noir flavor. Rebel Wilson, who scored big time as Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect, plays the woman who falls for Mackie's Adrian. Michael Rispoli has a nice turn as a porn king who's as sleazy as our trio of heroes, but smarter, and Ken Jeong makes a credible motivational guru, the man whose pseudo-philosophy encourages Wahlberg's Lugo to aspire to a future that doesn't involve wearing sweat pants.

Also look for Ed Harris, as a retired Miami detective who decides to help recover Shaloub's character's wealth.

You should take the movie's "R" rating seriously, but it's not always is easy to take the same attitude toward the rest of Pain & Gain, which can feel like drama gone berserk.

Look, Pain & Gain represents Bay's most interesting work in some time, even though its stylized agitation and dim-witted characters can feel increasingly mismatched.

And then there's this: Pain & Gain has some enjoyable kick, but to paraphrase a line from the late Pauline Kael, the movie may make you wonder why you're spending valuable time watching dumb people do a lot of dumb things.

Robots and rubble: 'Transformers' is back

Shia LaBeouf returns to lead director Michael Bay's latest marathon of destruction.

Right after Sept. 11, 2001, knowledgeable people were talking about the ways in which movies might be impacted. Surely, audiences would be turned off by the sight of skyscrapers falling in the heart of major cities. Reality finally would silence Hollywood’s worst impulses, forcing it to examine the ways in which it doled out cinematic pleasure – or so the argument went.

Almost a full decade after that fateful day, we can see just how naïve such initial reactions were. If you don’t believe me, watch the booming last act of director Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which (I’m embarrassed to say) is also the best part of the movie, a knock-down, drag-out rampage that makes surprisingly effective use of 3-D as most of downtown Chicago is reduced to rubble.

Everything about Dark of the Moon leads Bay and his cast toward this climactic battle in which the Decepticons (evil robots) square off against the Autobots (robots dedicated to helping mankind). And when Decepticons and Autobots get it on, they tend to smash everything in sight.

Grudging respect must be paid to Bay for offering a smorgasbord of ingredients that probably will animate the summer box-office. If the movie had a motto, it might be: "Ignore collateral damage, pile on the destruction."

Dark of the Moon adds a few new twists to its 154-minute running time, even making room for a cameo appearance by Bill O’Reilly. Yes, that Bill O’Reilly.

Among other additions: Appearances by John Malkovich (as a silver-haired tycoon); Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (as LaBeouf’s love interest); and Frances McDormand (as a U.S. intelligence officer). Leonard Nimoy -- no stranger to portentous sci-fi -- lends his voice to the character of Sentinel Prime, a sagacious Autobot that's brought back into action several decades after having crashed on the moon.

Megan Fox? She’s not present, but don't fret. A rear view of Huntington-Whiteley elicited happy adolescent hoots at a preview screening, which ought to give you some idea about her function in the movie.

Ah yes, the moon. For years, conspiracy theorists and cranks have argued that the U.S. never landed on the moon. Dark of the Moon advances another theory: It seems that the U.S. went to the moon to check out an alien craft that had smashed onto the lunar surface.

To make his case more persuasive, Bay mixes newsreel footage with historical re-creations that include Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and the late Walter Cronkite. I'm guessing, of course, but I can't help but think that the venerable CBS anchor would have been surprised to find himself adding traces of credibility to a loopy summer blockbuster.

After this "historical" introduction, the movie leaps into the present where LaBeouf’s Sam is jobless and living with his girlfriend (Huntington-Whiteley). Sam’s a little jealous of his girlfriend’s boss (Patrick Dempsey), a rich guy with a killer car collection.

Eventually, we learn that the Decepticons are trying to take over Earth so that they can save their dying civilization -- or something like that. The Autobots join with humans to stop the brutal Decpticons and to provide summer’s heaviest helping of metal-crunching chaos.

No offense to the robots, but they all tend to look alike, which may help explain why the movie never really develops a strong rooting interest, aside from encouraging us to wish that LaBeouf would tone down his over-amped performance.

I’ve read that the final battle sequence lasts for 50 minutes. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly felt like it. Bay goes for the action jugular with 3-D images of men plunging from skyscrapers and giant robots chipping away at Chicago’s skyline. A menacing, snake-like creation called Shockwave bores its way through concrete like an intergalactic jackhammer.

In case it's not yet clear, character development, story and emotional involvement all give way to Bay's spectacularly created marathon of destruction. If that’s what you’re after Dark of the Moon won’t shortchange you.

In fairness, it should be noted that Dark of the Moon represents a marked improvement over the last installment (Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen), but there’s a difference between a three-ring circus of mayhem and a story that aims to do more than give 'em a lot of what they came for -- and then add more on top of that.