Does Not Compute: Why Transformers 4 Is The Worst Yet

"Let's go home," says Marky Mark, fresh off 150 fucking minutes of saving the world - or whatever - alongside a Funky Bunch of giant transforming robots. "We don't have a home, dad," retorts Nicola Peltz, playing his blonde and blonder daughter, "it blew up."

Of course it did. If Michael Bay knows anything, it's how to blow shit up. In the explosion-movie canon, Bay is the DeMille of detonation; the visionary for whom every scene can be improved by the sight of CGI fireballs firing amidst the endless product-placement. 21 and 22 Jump Street just made much sport out of the action-movie's penchant for explosions, and the costliness of staging them, but Bay is on beyond comedy, beyond budgetary responsibility, off in some cinematic world of his own making, in which creation is just an excuse for destruction.

Transformers: Age Of Extinction marks the fourth film in Bay's ongoing 'adaptation' of a line of toys, and performs a mid-saga semi-reboot of its human protagonists. Gone are performance artist Shia LaBeouf and the thespian void Megan Fox. Now we get Mark Wahlberg and Peltz as a down-and-out father/daughter duo from on a farm in mythical Middle 'Merikah, a Heartland cliché manifest in water towers and porch swings, big hats and pickup trucks. Peltz is introduced, in a moment of true Bay flourish, with a lovingly-rendered 3D iMax ass shot; and, as well as the whole alien-robots-trying-to-destroy-the-world-or-some-shit storyline, this becomes the central dramatic device: Wahlberg's daughter is 'sexy'! The horror!

This is my "can't you tell I don't wanna be here either" face.

Like any proud grease-monkey pops, Wahlberg's #1 concern is keeping his lil'-girl's hymen intact; there shades of the creeeeepy American practice of 'Purity' rings/weddings/etc in the way Wahlberg demands she remain virgin-pure until he decides he'll allow her to spread her legs. This means that, even after Wahlberg has just witnessed life-long best friend T.J. Miller - an uncle/Godfather figure to his daughter, his co-partner in a junk-salvage business, and fleeting piece of mildly-amusing comic relief - die in (of course!) a torrent of shooting fireballs, he's not thinking about his home-bro's incinerated corpse or the existential emptiness of sentient existence. Shit no. What's more concerning than seeing the horrors of human mortality right before your eyes? That he discovers Peltz is covertly dating Irish beefcake Jack Reynor!

Grief, shmrief: there's no greater disaster than a daddy being faced with the fact that his lil' girl has sexual desires all of her very own. At first, Wahlberg acts like a dick to the dude who'd dare dream of diddling daddy-dearest's, even whilst trying to avoid annihilation at the hands of an evil CIA taskforce (code name: Cemetery Wind; which may or may not be an insider fart joke) and some evil transformers or aliens or whatever. Eventually, after they evade endless explosions, take part in countless car-chases, and save each others' lives several times over, Wahlberg finally relents: handing over the precious commodity of his daughter's chastity to this noble Irishman; it now Reynor's responsibility to protect such precious peroxided cargo. True to such, Peltz's Penelope In Peril spends must of her screen-time screaming and needing to be saved; the fourth Transformers film furthering the franchise's view of women as objects to be leered at, fetishised, or rescued.

Beyond a 17-year-old's virginity, well, the less said about the 'mythology' of the story the better. Puzzling why, for example, the Transformers are aliens who are also robots who are also latest-model US-market motor vehicles who are also crude ethnic stereotypes will just give you a headache. Why is the Ken Watanabe-voiced helicopter a Samurai cliché with metallic facial-hair? Why does the John Goodman-voiced tank chew on a robotic cigar? Why is there some jive-talkin' fairy-sprite with one leg? Why are there robots that transform into Dinosaurs? Why does the robo-alien villain of the piece have robotic hounds? Except, of course, to release them?

Clearly there are bigger issues going on here than my love life, guys!

There are no good answers to these questions. Nor is there much, throughout Age Of Extinction, that can be conceived of as 'good' in any way. Certainly not storytelling. Certainly not filmmaking. Bay's way, naturally, is to make the explosions so big you forget how dire the drama is; that you don't linger on the fact one of the Transformers actually says "we swore to play by the rules, now... the rules have changed!" And so there's scenes of labour-intensive CGI where Transformers tumble in slow-motion juggling their human cargo. Where Wahlberg, Reynor, and Peltz teeter on cables swinging between an alien mothership and the top of the Sears Tower (only she's too scared/girly to try and save herself); clinging for your life a thousand feet off the ground never seeming so free of suspense. And where said alien mothership sucks up ships from Hong Kong harbour with a very-selective ultra-powered magnet, then drops them on the downtown, toppling buildings like a lego skyline.

"Innocent civilians get killed all the time," says Kelsey Grammer's human-villain, rationalising how a few robot-on-robot firefights may murder humans en masse, but advance a cause. You're supposed to hiss him for speaking such sentiment aloud, but lord knows how many fictionalised people are incinerated in Age Of Extinction's parade of fireballs. Someone with a conscience might think twice before making popcorn fodder out of depicting the deaths of thousands (millions?) of people, but Bay cares not for your pesky conscience. As always, in the face of minor concerns like morality, plausibility, or non-idiocy, he just hits the switch, and blows everything up; from farmhouses to factories, humans to robots, narrative logic to common sense.