‘Transformers: The Last Knight’: When substance gets lost in style

I want to refrain from just bashing “Transformers: The Last Knight” and instead focus on something that popped into my head while I was watching the movie.

See, the primary overarching criticism of Michael Bay, director of all five installments of the current “Transformers” franchise, is that his brand of cinema is all style and no substance. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

Consider a scene early in “The Last Knight” where professor Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock) dishes to a bunch of kids about the veracity of the King Arthur legend. She tell the kids the reason we tell stories like King Arthur is because we as humans want to believe “when all seems lost, a few brave souls can save everything we’ve ever known.” This speech is repeated verbatim at a critical juncture later in the movie, ensuring the audience knows this little bit is very important.

This is a subtle way of commenting on the importance of story to humans, and why we are compelled to do so. “The Last Knight” is hardly the first movie to touch on this subject, but it’s a subject worth talking about. It reminds us that stories, be they written or visual, serves a purpose and that movies can do so much more than just entertain.

Unfortunately, this message gets lost in the Michael Bay-ness of the proceedings.

Bay’s films regularly feature lame acting, worse writing, stories hodge-podged together from bits of better flicks, and chaotic, interminable action scenes that are barely distinguishable one from another. Bay’s style of kinetic camera and shooting action scenes to be pieced together in the editing room is so iconic, it’s been given it’s own name: Bayhem.

And “The Last Knight” is no exception.

The story is a convoluted mess involving a magic staff, the Transformer homeworld of Cybertron, an order of knights sworn to protect the history of the Transformers on earth and Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) going to the Dark Side. Scenes seem to be just set next to each other, with nothing driving things from one scene to the next. Characters show up in scenes with no explanation of how they got there.

The acting is nothing to write home about.

Mark Wahlberg, Haddock and Josh Duhamel aren’t bad, but they don’t really stand out either. Anthony Hopkins is great, but he’s Anthony Hopkins and that’s expected from him.

The voice acting from John Goodman, Ken Watanabe and Steve Buscemi is pretty amusing.

It doesn’t help that they have to deliver dialogue that sounds like it was written by aliens pretending to be humans. Seriously, the dialogue is face-palmingly bad. Most of the Autobots speak in pyro bursts of annoying teen jargon and cuss words. I guess this is how the screenwriters think the cool kids talk.

The rest of the movie is a deluge of chaotic Bayhem action sequences, replete with shrapnel, a camera that whips around like Indiana Jones in a snake pit, and huge explosions. Bay stuffs his frames so full of stuff, that it’s easy to zone out. In fact, it’s only been a couple hours, and I’m already forgetting a lot of the details that happened in the movie.

And that makes it hard to concentrate on what “The Last Knight” is really about. The subtext about storytelling and why we do it is buried by all the other stuff fighting for your attention. But if you can concentrate, you’ll find “Transformers: The Last Knight” surprisingly has a lot on its mind. That doesn’t make it good. It’s not. But it’s not as bad as I was expecting.

2 ½ Indy Fedoras out of 5

MPAA Rating: PG-13