This familiarity wouldn’t necessarily matter too much, but a considerable amount of pre-release hype was put into convincing us that Age Of Extinction wouldn’t be a straight sequel to Dark Of The Moon. Much was made of the more serious tone and the change in cast, with Shia LaBeouf and his various sidekicks having been retired for Mark Wahlberg and Jack Reynor. Yet while Wahlberg brings puppy-eyed enthusiasm and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy as the new leading man, the film around him is simply much, much more of the same. The moments that could hit home – a terrific fight on the exterior of a Hong Kong building, a nervy escape from Titus Welliiver’s enjoyably evil CIA assassin – are simply lost in a sea of repetitive violence. There are few signs that lessons have been learned from the earlier films, either. The dialogue’s still as cloth-eared as it ever was (one character even goes to the trouble to explain how a magnet works during a high-speed chase), Bay’s camera still lingers dubiously over the anatomies of his scant female cast, and the film’s just as cluttered and busy, in every respect, as the previous three films. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger appears to have been influenced by quite a few recent science fiction films when writing Age Of Extinction. There’s a mysterious substance called Transformium which could have come from Avatar, some heavy-handed meditations on xenophobia akin to that seen in the X-Men franchise, while Cade’s relationship with his daughter appears to have been lifted wholesale from Bay’s 90s disaster film, Armageddon. Admittedly, Age Of Extinction is far less crass and obnoxious than Revenge Of The Fallen, but its also less coherent than Dark Of The Moon, a film which, after an extremely slow first half built to an impressively-staged battle in Chicago. Age Of Extinction, on the other hand, meanders from place to place without really building to anything. There are so many actors in here that it’s easy to forget them all. We haven’t even mentioned Sophia Myles’s character, Darcy, who uncovers something mysterious (borrowing a plot point from Prometheus in the process) and then disappears for a good 40 or 50 minutes. Then there are the Dinobots – heavily teased in the trailers and posters – who take an absolute eternity to finally show up, and display a disappointing lack of personality when they finally do. Even less personality, come to think of it, than the Autobot with the pot belly and beard who unaccountably smokes a cigar (Hound, voiced by John Goodman), or the green Australian one who wears a long coat like Brian May out of Queen, or the haiku-spouting samurai one voiced by Ken Watanabe. Then again, the human cast seems to be genuinely enjoying itself. The always-welcome Stanley Tucci shouts, screams and grins, while Wahlberg throws himself around with the abandon of a child giddy on too much orange squash. Some viewers might have a similar amount o ffun with Michael Bay’s latest cavalcade of swooping cameras and grinding mayhem. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
