Four movies into this franchise and it’s more of an endurance test to get to the end. The quality has always been all over the place, from a decent start, to a horrific sequel to a much better third movie. Age of Extinction feels tired and dragged out in every conceivable way.

The set up is mostly the same. The Autobots are in hiding after the events of the last movie as the battle in Chicago turned the nation against these aliens. When a new threat arises, the Autobots are needed to fight again. Most of the human cast is new with cookie cutter characters who more or less just run and scream when necessary.

Everything feels very paint by numbers, it follows the Transformers mold without anything really added to it. Sure there are new characters, but they all do the same thing. One city is replaced by another for the last action scene. Optimus Prime is completely unstoppable as he repeatedly gets up from devastating damage. Massive liberties with the laws of physics. Action scenes that are like watching a circus as there is so much going on at once that you don’t know what your supposed to be looking at. Computer generated images just running into each other. It gets exhausting. The quality of CG also varies quite a bit. The third movie has some truly stunning work from start to finish while Age tends to have compositing issues. While the robots usually blend and match well with the live action, it can get sloppy which is distracting. Direction wise, it’s Michael Bay so you know exactly what to expect (there are some sweet explosions).

Somehow they managed to stretch this out to over 2 and a half hours when it has no business going passed 2. It just keeps going and going and going.  I think not making a movie as bad as the second one is an achievement, but there’s nothing here worth paying attention to. Somehow they keep pulling in massive amount of money, so until more people get bored and move on, I don’t think there’s an end in sight.