I have seen all the Transformers movies. I wear that as a badge of shame more than one of pride. The first one was fun. It came out of nowhere and was better than anyone thought it would be. Then there was a string of bad to terrible ones. In 2018 "Bumblebee" came out. It focused on only one of the Transformers, Bumblebee, and became unquestionably, the best movie in the series. It didn't make obscene amounts of money, so the studio abandoned smaller, tighter stories with good characters and returned to the big, messy stories with disposable characters.

That brings us to "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts." Plot? The bad guy wants the MacGuffin and sends his flunkies after it; the good guys fight to protect it. Movie ends. For the uninformed, a MacGuffin is an object in the movie that moves the plot forward but is ultimately insignificant. Think The Maltese Falcon, The Ark of the Covenant, or The One Ring.

"Rise of the Beasts" was better than most of the previous movies, but when the bar is that low, it doesn't take much to clear it. It had its moments, but the movie, on the whole, is terrible. The characters are underwritten (not a surprise for a movie about robots that transform into cars). I will say that I liked these characters better than anyone in the mainline Transformers saga. Anthony Ramos's Noah and Dominique Fishback's Elena are people with wants and desires. They have much more to contribute to the plot than " the human working with the Autobots."

The action sequences were solid until the final battle, when it became a mess. A problem with many final battle sequences these days is they become CGI chaos, and the storytelling and character development gets tossed to the side. That happens here as they find the swarms of nameless bad guys. There are never any stakes because the good guys are never losing in this final fight.

I was not expecting this to be a fantastic movie; these movies are incapable of doing that. I had some fun, but overall it was as empty and hollow as its predecessors.

5/10

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language

2hrs.7mins.