The rollercoaster ride that is the Transformers franchise is truly mind-boggling. It’s a series of surprising highs and aggravating lows. It’s a series that can deliver exactly what you want from big popcorn entertainment in one film and then turn around and repeat their earlier mistakes in the very next movie. Take 2014’s “Age of Extinction”, a terrific installment (despite a lot of jaded criticism) that dialed back a lot of the noise to tell a silly yet fun and action-packed story.

But then came “The Last Knight”, a box office disaster that lost over $100 million for Paramount Pictures. And it’s easy to see why. Unlike its immediate predecessor, “The Last Knight” is a confounding mess. It’s a movie plagued by so many bad choices in front of the camera but mostly behind it. The outcome was clearly unforeseen as the film ends with obvious aspirations for another sequel. As it stands Bay has stepped down from directing Transformers movies and it looks like Paramount may be abandoning this storyline and latching onto the “Bumblebee” arc instead.

The bulk of the film’s problems can be easily traced to the screenplay. Gone is Ehren Kruger who wrote the previous two films. This time writing duties are handed to the trio of Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Ken Nolan. Their biggest issue revolves around their desperate attempts at being funny. But rather than good humor, they gave us the same maddening banter that made 2009’s “Revenge of the Fallen” so hard to sit through. Here they cram in the juvenile and often potty-mouthed wisecracking which makes much of the film feel shallow, pubescent, and at times insufferable.

Even if you can wade through the mind-melting bickering and brutally bad slapstick that’s mostly prevalent in the first half, it doesn’t get much better from there. The breakneck storytelling features one narrative shortcut after another. Even worse, the movie never slows down to breathe. It never stops to let the characters have actual meaningful moments. We’re just rushed from point to point as Bay and company drown us in nonsensical mythologizing that never reaches any kind of satisfying conclusion. It’s all excess and overload that quickly devolves into a grind.

Mark Wahlberg returns as Cade Yeager, a single father and inventor who helped Optimus Prime and the few remaining Autobots save the planet in the previous film. In “The Last Knight” he owns a massive junkyard which he secretly uses to hide Transformers from the still aggressive United States government. Cade encounters and takes in a young orphaned scavenger named Izabella (Isabela Moner in a paper-thin role). He also crosses paths with a dying Transformer who gives him a mysterious talisman that immediately connects to his body.

Elsewhere yet another government special ops unit pops up – this one called the Transformer Reaction Force. The group is ran by General Morshower (played by Glenn Morshower) and is reluctantly led in the field by Colonel William Lennox (a returning Josh Duhamel). The TRF (dumbly) joins forces with Megatron and his Decepticons upon learning that Cade has the potentially powerful talisman. As you can probably guess, a clash ensues.

And even further elsewhere we meet an aging historian named Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins – how they got him onboard is still a mystery to me). He’s the last living member of a secret society who has long protected the ancient history of the Transformers and their connections to earth. Burton sends his hopelessly annoying robot butler Cogman (Jim Carter) to bring Cade to his villa in England. He also brings in Oxford professor Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock). Both are key to stopping a goddess (of sorts) from Cybertron named Quintessa (Gemma Chan) who has a convoluted master plan that involves (or course) destroying earth.

All of those things attempt to come together in the film’s draining 149 minutes but making sense of it proves to be a chore. Bay blitzes through from one exposition dump to the next at ridiculous speeds. The human characters monopolize most of the runtime with the Transformers often feeling like an afterthought. Meanwhile none of the human drama is that interesting and none of the characters earn our emotional investment. They’re never given time to. And all of it is peppered with this unfunny humor which the screenwriters eventually tone down but never fully put away.

To its credit the film does look good (as all of them do) thanks to Bay’s kinetic love-it-or-hate-it style and some top-tier digital effects. But that’s not enough to save the movie from its own self-inflicted wounds. “The Last Knight” simply tries to do too much. Some of it could’ve been interesting. Other things are just too goofy to take seriously. But all of it suffers due to the relentless attempts at humor, much of it being too crude for kids and too sophomoric for adults. It’s no wonder it underperformed at the box office.

VERDICT – 1.5 STARS