2013 was such an amazing year for movies that 2014 felt anticlimactic by comparison before it even started. Back in the spring, I kept looking at calendars of upcoming releases and noting, “This is an unusually front-loaded summer. Everything I’ve been waiting for is coming out in May. Hardly any big releases are left by July. I don’t think there are as many big movies this year as there were last summer.”
I guess it’s just a happy coincidence that this was The Summer of 1,000 Calamities for my family. Due to unforeseen circumstances, I saw fewer movies than usual, and even fewer bad movies than usual. For the sake of this blog, I’ve still done my best to review one new movie per week, but I haven’t always succeeded.
If my dad hadn’t unexpectedly gone into liver failure, my husband and I would have seen more than nineteen movies, and surely many of those would have turned out to be less-than-stellar. We were especially excited to see Sex Tape because the preview looked hilarious, and (judging by the word of other critics) that movie turned out to be terrible. (Of course, given my sometimes frustrating predisposition to see the good in everything, I probably would have liked Sex Tape and given it a largely positive review. So maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t see it, after all.)
Ordinarily, the end of summer is where the very worst of the summer movies go to die. We managed to miss almost all of those, so I’m afraid I don’t have any true Fs this year, and only one D. And (much to my own surprise) the movie at the very bottom of my list was not the fourth installment of Transformers!
19.) Planes: Fire & Rescue (D)
Why I Didn’t Like it:
I’ll keep this short. The first 80 minutes of this 83 minute movie bored me so much that I started to wish that I were trying to escape from a real forest fire instead of watching the animated rescue planes muddle across the screen for one more second.
(Seriously! And I think that’s how little kids manage to enjoy Planes: Fire & Rescue. They see Dusty Crophopper and think, I wish I were a plane. Vroom! Vroom! And then they pretend they’re a plane as they watch the movie and make up a story much more engaging and satisfying than anything going on up on the screen.)
This movie is boring. It’s slow. It’s badly written. Its atrocious pacing makes last year’s Turbo look like a masterpiece of cinema. I did not enjoy watching the first 80 minutes of the movie at all.
But that’s all I’ll say.
To be honest, I’m embarrassed to say that much. I shouldn’t even be writing this review. Let’s face it, Planes: Fire & Rescue only got a theatrical release because Disney knows the popularity of the Cars franchise means it will make them easy money. Quality-wise, it feels much more like a direct-to-video or even Disney Channel Original movie. And it’s also made for little kids, not thirty-five-year-old women.
Basically I saw this movie with my five-year-old daughter only because we had no available babysitter, and Planes: Fire & Rescue started at the same time as Lucy, which my husband and I took turns seeing.
Writing a long, scathing review of this movie would just be petty, like a famed restaurant critic savaging a McDonalds Happy Meal.
(For those adults considering watching Planes 2, though, I will mention that I thoroughly enjoy the following programming aimed at very young children: Classic Sesame Street, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Max and Ruby, Curious George, and Timmy Time. I also like the original Cars (well enough) and all the cute little Cars toons on the Disney Channel.)
Why You Might Like It:
Is Dusty Crophopper your bike? That’s why my five-year-old said she liked the movie. My eleven-year-old stepson says he liked the movie, too. And while we were at Disneyland this summer, I noticed several little kids jabbering excitedly about Planes characters. That’s the biggest reason I’m not giving Planes: Fire & Rescue an F.
To be honest, Planes: Fire & Rescue doesn’t deserve an F. Despite the atrocious pacing and lackluster script, Planes: Fire & Rescue has a wonderful, true, hard-hitting moral, a lesson that young children looking for life guidance might find genuinely helpful.
The first 80 minutes are unbearable, yes, but the last three actually made me tear up! I’m not lying. At the end of the movie, I cried (and not just in relief). Considering my almost total lack of engagement, my visceral reaction to this final, moving moment came as a great shock to me and prevented me from completely hating the film.
The bottom line is, Planes: Fire & Rescue has no idea how to tell a story at all, but, nevertheless, it does have something valuable and compelling to say.
18.) Transformers: Age of Extinction (C)
What I Liked:
Surprised by the genuinely entertaining antics of Stanley Tucci and Bingbing Li, I loved the last act of this movie and left the theater feeling shocked by my own sense of satisfaction. Up to this point, the last hour of every Transformers outing has sent me into a catatonic dream state of painful boredom, induced by sensory overload. But (to my total shock) in Age of Extinction, the final hour is (by far) the most entertaining part of the movie.
No words in any language I know can express the depth and profundity of my shock, so forgive me if I seem to blather on and on about this ineffectually.
I mean, I actually really enjoyed the first Transformers movie. Tonally it’s over the place, and most of the humor arises when characters behave in irrational, illogical (maybe even unrealistic) ways for no apparent reason. But that’s why I like it. Shia La Beouf’s Sam begins as an exceptionally quirky, tightly wound, neurotic adolescent oddball, and then…remains that way for all three movies in which he appears. Sam’s mom (bane of many) absolutely cracks me up, even though—no, actually, because—she behaves like a character on a Disney Channel show.
So the first two-thirds of 2007’s Transformers is a giddy, silly, bewildering, highly amusing adrenaline rush. Then the movie begins to end. It sets up its final battle. And that battle continues for an entire hour.
In terms of character development and plot advancement, the movie is over. You could stop watching it right there, leave the theater a full hour early, ask a friend, “What happened at the end?” hear, “They had a big fight, and the Autobots won,” and plotwise you would be totally caught up. In fact, leave any of the first three Transformers movies an hour early, and I promise, you will miss nothing.
Well, you’ll miss nothing other than mindblowing, non-stop, multi-million dollar action, the lure of the 3D, the thrill of the CGI. If you’re the type who loves to be barraged with non-stop, overwhelming (noisy) destructive action (with almost no dialogue and little humor), then you’re probably a Transformers fan and loved all three Shia LaBeouf movies because all three of them end like that.
But Age of Extinction breaks away from that formula. Early on, the movie shocks Transformers fans by embracing tonal evenness and eschewing (random bursts of) screwball comedy. And then in the last hour, it practically turns into a self-conscious parody of the Bourne franchise. Stanley Tucci and Bingbing Li are not only totally hilarious, they’re tremendously engaging, as well. It’s so much fun to watch them. And all of the crazy, explosive action is for some reason easier and more enjoyable to watch, too. I don’t know whether to thank superior sound mixing, more forward momentum, better writing, but whatever is going on, I liked it, and I sure didn’t expect to like it.
Other points in the film’s favor include a surprisingly authentic (for a Hollywood movie) representation of Texas (hint: it helps when you actually film in Texas), breathtaking (sometimes even head-scratching) visuals, the reassuring presence of Peter Cullen (voicing Optimus Prime, as always), and of course the fact that we’re supposed to believe Mark Wahlberg is a mad robot scientist/single dad from the Texas Hill Country.
What I Didn’t Like:
The first two hours of the movie?
In a fair world, the biggest strike against this movie ought to be that it’s two hours and forty-five minutes long and yet still doesn’t find room for its entire plot. To understand what’s actually going on (with the dinobots and the creators and everything) you must explore supplemental sources like the recent cartoon series and numerous toy brochures. I suspected this while watching and confirmed my impressions after the film when our eleven-year-old son started explaining it all to me in great detail on the ride home from the theater.
Now I understand the limitations of a theatrical feature. Filmmakers don’t have much time. You’ll never find the level of detail in a film that you do in a book on the same subject. But, filmmakers, when you’re trimming things, let me suggest that the plot is perhaps one of the elements that ought to wind up inside the movie rather than on the cutting room floor (or the recycle bin of the screenwriter’s laptop, as the case may be). Not everything can make the movie, sure. I understand. But given almost three hours to work with, you ought to find room to squeeze plot essentials in there somewhere.
So, as I said, in a fair world, that would be the biggest strike against Age of Extinction. But we don’t live in a fair world, and by now everybody knows that Michael Bay movies are more about the pyrotechnics than the plot, so given audience expectations going in, the whole plot thing turns out not to matter much at all.
What’s truly objectionable about Transformers: Age of Extinction is its rampant misogyny and often outright misanthropy. In this installment, no humans can be trusted, the Autobots have all become massive jerks (except maybe Optimus Prime), and the obligatory girl, Tessa Yeager, usually behaves so idiotically that it isn’t even funny, just annoying and kind of offensive.
As Transformers girls go, Tessa is a step down even from Carly (who was never interesting, but was, to her credit, conspicuously pretty). The completely bland Tessa makes Mikeala Barnes look like a feminist icon/sexbomb/superhero all rolled into one, and Peltz’s performance makes Megan Fox seem like the next Meryl Streep. (That may not be Peltz’s fault, of course. What she’s given to work with comes across as less than nothing.)
The movie’s jaded misanthropy may be a (surprisingly insightful) reflection on the times in which we live, but it’s still no fun to watch. And some moments of pointedly cruel misogyny played for laughs are legitimately disturbing.
The lack of tonal inconsistency also makes the first two hours of the movie relentlessly, ploddingly dark and dull, so boring that I kept finding myself thinking, “What a spectacular failure of a film! Surely no one can be enjoying this without trying very hard!” Its final hour is redeemingly (and, as I said, shockingly) entertaining. But its first hour is seriously like slow torture. And then there’s still like whole other hour to go before it actually starts to get good!
I like Mark Wahlberg because he’s usually so mad, but Cade Yeager’s behavior doesn’t make a lot of sense. Cade’s various plans of action are only logical if you’re one of the Looney Tunes. (Unfortunately for the audience, Yeager’s schemes are not zany and hilarious, just ill-advised).
The plot is convoluted, the pacing is atrocious, and for the first (almost) two hours, the movie is generally pretty awful and unpleasant to watch.
I’m not saying that no one will like it. (Our eleven-year-old loves it!) Once Stanley Tucci goes to China, the movie improves exponentially and actually gets downright good! But two hours is a really long time to wait for a movie to become entertaining.
In the end, Age of Extinction turns out to be the second best Transformers movie ever, but to get to the good part, you have to suffer through what feels like an age of unbearable exposition, exposition that takes so long, in fact, that the idea of extinction begins to sound like a welcome relief.
Would I want to watch the fourth Transformers movie again? The last hour of it, sure! The whole thing? Only if my other choice were to watch Planes: Fire & Rescue.