How does a fourth movie both improve upon as well as lay waste to a movie franchise that is now nine years old? You make us excited for Galvatron, you make us excited for the Dinobots, you make us excited with Mark Wahlberg instead of Shia Lebeouf and you even make us excited with the possibility of Unicron. Yet, you deliver a make shift human made Galvatron, no Unicron, some intergalactic bounty hunters that you give us no reason for ever existing or why they are after their bounty, and yet another return of the foe that for some reason can not be killed? Rip his head off, tear him in half, it doesn’t matter he will survive. And, a total of five, yes five Autobots! But, you delivered to us the Dinobots, oh boy did you deliver to us the Dinobots! This coupled with Marky Mark and the fact that you could actually tell what was happening most of the time in the movie without the extreme closeups of the third film, might be what saved this movie.
Kelsey Grammer delivers a role you can love to hate him in, with Nicola Peltz in the “obligatory” Transformers movie hot girl that delivered better than the others and a redeemable bad/good guy role by Stanley Tucci. All this adds up to must see for die hard fans, a see if there is nothing else for wayward fans and a wait for digital for non fans movie. I would give it a little more than the 18% it has so far received on Rotten Tomatoes, but not enough to recommend it to anyone but the die hard fans or those, who like me, just want to be entertained enough for a night out. The one thing you do get is plenty of blatant product placement. So much so, that it could put a Man of Steel to shame in both it and wanton destruction.