Transformers serves away from the charm of Bumblebee back to the tedious machismo of Bay

Director: Steven Caple Jnr

Cast: Anthony Ramos (Noah Diaz), Dominique Fishback (Elena Wallace), Dean Scott Vazquez (Kris Diaz), Luna Lauren Velez (Breanna Diaz), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Ron Perlman (Optimus Primal), Peter Dinklage (Scourge), Michelle Yeoh (Airazor), Pete Davidson (Mirage), Liza Koshy (Arcee), Colman Domingo (Unicron)

Somehow the Transformers franchise lucked out and managed to make a film I actually wouldn’t feel awkward showing to a child. Bumblebee avoided the crude sexualisation and graphic violence (hidden by the fact you are watching CGI engine oil and bits of metal flying around, rather than blood and bits of human flesh) of Michael Bay’s films. I really enjoyed it. I can’t really say the same about this follow-up. I’d at least let a child watch it – although it’s the cinematic equivalent of letting them have a Big Mac for dinner.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts could have continued in the tone of Bumblebee, a delightful mix of cartoon and Buster Keaton/Laurel and Hardy. Instead, it takes tiny elements of that, then mashes them up with the throw-it-all-at-the-screen style of Bay. It’s not a happy marriage, and Rise of the Beasts is tired and overly familiar, crammed with crude banter and the sort of mass smackdown we’ve seen done time-and-time again. Give me strength. Rise of the Beasts isn’t really a sequel to Bumblebee – the events of that film are referred to only in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference. The boyish charm of Bumblebee is drenched in audio clip quotes from Scarface and the like. Instead, it’s another “end of the world seconds away from a giant robot monster” flick.

Far in the future Unicorn (voiced with regal indifference by Colman Domingo), the planet eating robot from the 1985 film (when he was voiced by a final pay-cheque collecting Orson Welles) is trapped in another dimension, but wants to break into ours. He sends his minion Scourge (Peter Dinklage, dialling it in big time) to 1990s Earth to hunt down the MacGuffin that will do it. Only Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and his Autobots can stop him, allied with an ex-soldier desperately trying to help his kid brother Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) and Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) a junior archaeologist who can unearth the MacGuffin from where it has been hidden centuries ago by the Maximals, a group of transformers descended from our Autobots who transform into giant mechanical animals (their leader Optimus Primal is a Kong style ape).

It all seems a million miles away from the charm of the first film, with a teenage girl bonding with her first car who just happens to be a clumsy robot. There is precious little charm at all Rise of the Beasts. The human characters are either faintly forgettable, loud and brash or serve only as plot points. Anthony Ramos has to do a lot of digging to find any depth in a character given only a cursory plotline of desperation to provide for his mum and brother. Dominique Fishback’s archaeologist has the faintest of backstories about being cheated out of the credit for her work, before she’s fiddling with MacGuffins with handwave lines. The action zips across two universes and two continents, but never seems to really find firm grounding for itself.

There’s also something rather sad about the film swopping out the fairy tale elements of Bumblebee with a far more conventional Bro-romance. Ramos’ street-wise ex-soldier is paired up with Peter Davidson’s Mirage, a loud-mouthed Autobot who, despite a few witty lines, basically comes across as a street-wise bro with a hot streak of immaturity. There is a streak of laddish banter throughout the film – none of it, thank God, as appallingly sexist or racist as what passes for this sort of chat in Bay’s films – that essentially doubles down on restoring the franchise to something that appeals only to teenage boys and adults who wish they still were teenage boys.

After the broadening out of Bumblebee with a female lead given actual agency, this feels like a retrograde step. Rise of the Beasts does manage to pay this Bros plotline off with a surprisingly effective scene of self-sacrifice – but does so while not shirking on red-blooded (or red-oiled) young men whooping and cheering as they blast stuff out of the sky. It’s a step firmly back towards a territory that places male relationships at a premium – be it bros or actual brothers – and the bonds between men a world that leaves women on the outside looking in.

Not to mention the plot continually readjusts its stakes and characters depending on the requirements from scene to scene. Scourge is an unstoppable killing machine… until the plot requires him not to be. Characters are killed off… until the plot needs them to come back to life. Characters are fixated on their own needs… until the plot needs them to be altruistic. It combines that up with a final battle sequence that feels painfully derivative of the end of Avengers: Endgame, with Scourge mustering an army of rent-a-baddies to slow down the heroes while he slowly plugs a thingamee into a do-hickey.

Even Optimus Prime takes a backward step. While Bumblebee salvaged some likeability out of this hero, Rise of the Beasts very much returns him to Bay form: a deeply flawed leader with anger-management issues, who slices and dices foes with reckless abandon, rips off heads and uses neat kiss-off lines like “Then DIE”. I suppose he doesn’t execute at point-blank range a surrendering foe begging for mercy (Bay did this twice!) but he still hardly feels like an admirable hero. Rise of the Beasts vaguely acknowledges this by having Prime go on a loose arc of learning to put the needs of humans on a level with the Autobots (yup he’s also a proto-racist at the start) but it’s a very loose peg to hang a hero on.

Rise of the Beasts gives up on any pretensions of doing something fresh, engaging or different with the series. Even the beasts, for all their animalistic looks, are basically barely characters, more different looking toys imported into a flagging cinematic universe (Ron Perlman and Michelle Yeoh lazily yawn their way through terminal dialogue). While Bumblebee took the starting principles of the franchise and found the joy in them, Rise of the Beasts is a teenage wet dream of toys hitting each other to no great purpose, that places male relationships at its heart and leaves you with nothing to really care about. It’s a callback to everything bad about this franchise.