I’m going to try and keep this review as brief as possible.

On average, I adored the Transformers movies thus far — I saw the first installment in  high school, and every movie gave me cause to joyously regress to that fat, pimply kid and enjoy the candy corn that was the best toy movie franchise ever made. Sadly, there comes a point when a boy must mature into a man; for me, that moment came hours ago, when I saw Transformers: The Last Knight.

Filmed almost entirely in IMAX 3D, Michael Bay’s swansong to his time in the toy department makes use of the immersive format like nothing I’ve seen before, but if only more time was spent in the much-publicized writers’ room. Rest assured it’s not the ghastly hodgepodge that the second film, Revenge of the Fallen, was, but boy oh boy, is it uninspired. Then again, what could one expect of a group of writers headed by Akiva Goldsman, whose brainchildren include Batman & Robin, Winter’s Tale and The Da Vinci Code? Speaking of uninspired, most of the human actors present in this film are somewhere between giving it their all and collecting a paycheck — Marky-Mark patently wants out, Isabela Moner is charming but sparsely seen, Anthony Hopkins and Laura Haddock are having too much fun, and Josh Duhamel… next.

The biggest offenders in this film are the sound editors and mixers — if this film had a middle name, it would be “bombastic.” Even for an IMAX-optimized movie, it’s deafness-inducing, and the last thing I want after seeing a movie is to be fitted with hearing aids — no Oscar nods for any of y’all.

Though The Last Knight is meh than meets the eye, I still hold a tiny glimmer of hope for the four-friggin-teen Transformers movies and spin-offs in development, so here’s hoping the Bayhem has met its end at the hands of coherence.

Rating: 2/5