Transformers rise of the beasts

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Photo: Paramount Pictures Thoroughly frivolous and yet somehow still exhausting, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts might have worked fine as a Saturday morning cartoon back in the days when Saturday morning cartoons were a thing. Maybe that’s the problem — that there’s little room left nowadays for simple, childish pleasures, and everything has to be stretched out to a feature-length spectacle that shrieks and howls and stomps for your attention. It’s a particular challenge for this desperate-to-revive-itself movie franchise, which began in 2007 as a brazenly silly Michael Bay sci-fi epic about huge fighting robots that turn into vehicles, all crashing metal and rolling bluster. For all the advance hype, that first Transformers picture felt like an unlikely megahit at the time; though based on a line of ‘80s toys from Hasbro, it took itself so seriously that you couldn’t help but admire its perverse bravado, which of course made it an ideal Michael Bay project. Subsequent entries earned plenty of money, but the series eventually devolved to galactic levels of convoluted idiocy. (2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight was pretty much Bumblebee, directed by LAIKA animation honcho Travis Knight, felt like a necessary reset — a modest, almost sentimental little movie about a teenage girl and her car that just happened to have some fighting robots in it. Bumblebee had heart, but you also found yourself missing some of that earlier Bayhem, despite ...