Transformers: The Last Knight

Transformers: The Last Knight could well be the fifth movie in the super-successful franchise based on the line of toy cars, trucks and other vehicles that transform into cool robots… but I can't be 100% sure of that.

I mean, these films have become such a crazy, cacophonous freeway pile-up of twisted metal since the first Transformers crashed into cinemas a decade ago that it's increasingly impossible to distinguish one from the other.

And with The Last Knight, director/field marshal Michael Bay throws even more bizarre stuff at the wall. (Who really killed Hitler? The answer may surprise you!)

You might think that lashings of absurdity combined with Bay's undeniable talent for bringing large-scale carnage to the screen would result in an unparalleled rollercoaster ride. In this case, however, you would be wrong.

The Last Knight is occasionally inspired, mostly because of the twinkle in the eye of a very respected actor having a ball with some very silly dialogue (more about that shortly), but it's really just more of the same.

And the same is getting stale, even if it has all the bells and whistles a budget in excess of $200 million can buy.

Explaining what this new Transformers movie is all about has a pretty high degree of difficulty, but here goes: it all begins in the Dark Ages when King Arthur (yes, that King Arthur) gets a little assistance on the battlefield from a metallic dragon.

A millennium and a half later, and we're in America, where years of skirmishes between good Autobots and bad Decepticons have left cities in ruins and made the robots-in-disguise unpopular with the powers that be.

Still, they have a few human allies, such as blue-collar inventor and all-around cool dude Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg), who helped save the world in the last movie, Age Of Extinction, and has to save it all over again when Decepticon sorceress Quintessa steers the robot planet of Cybertron into a collision course with Earth.

I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. But wait, it gets better!

The secret weapon in the clash against the evil Transformers is the staff of Merlin (yes, that Merlin), and only his direct descendant, smokin' hot scholar Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), can wield it.

And how do our heroes - and we, the audience - discover this? By way of a manic monologue delivered by Sir Anthony Hopkins as Sir Edmund Burton, a blue-blood aristocrat who knows an awful lot about the very long, very strange history of the Autobots-Decepticon feud.

Give the Oscar-winning Silence Of The Lambs star due respect here - he doesn't have much to do beyond delivering chewy chunks of dialogue that attempt to move this lummox of a story forward a few inches but he gives it his considerable all, mischievously revelling in the silliness of it all.

And to be fair to The Last Knight, there are times when this loud, lumbering behemoth of a blockbuster tries to do the same. But more often than not, it's awkward, incoherent and dull.