You emerge from the cinema fearing that you have missed entire seasons by the time this fifth Transformers live-action movie comes to an end, and it feels like you have been watching it for even longer. From the outset, this is another preposterously noisy, messy and huge-scale movie (aided well by native IMAX 3D shooting) by which the viewer is beaten senseless quite early on, meaning that by the time it reaches its insanely huge third act it almost loses sense and meaning. The effect of the writers room approach shows clearly, written for action beats rather than narrative and emotional beats, but the dialogue is largely woeful almost to the point of self-parody, especially the dreadful and frequent attempts at humour that persistently fall flat, even with the introduction of more comedy sidekick robots that derailed the second movie. Being UK-centred, there is a different look in evidence (especially the London and Oxford chase scenes, and the underwater/Stonehenge sequences at the end), with Anthony Hopkins giving a very knowing performance, Mark Wahlberg reliably trying to engage throughout and Laura Haddock getting a Megan Fox makeover. Dark Of The Moon and (to a fair extent) Age Of Extinction showed a greater and more effective control of tone and structure; if you want the big-bang robots 'n' explosions, then The Last Knight delivers admirably, but - like Revenge Of The Fallen - it offers little more.
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