Transformers: The Rise of the Beasts: They Shouldn’t Have Touched the Bumblebee

Returning to the action and spectacle that have captured moviegoers around the world, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts will take audiences on a ’90s globetrotting adventure with the Autobots and introduce a whole new faction of Transformer — the Maximals — to the existing battle on earth between Autobots and Decepticons.

Review:

Crash and bang and some gold old rock’em sock’em robot action is all I ever require of a Transfomers movie.  And, oh, that you leave my favorite auto-bot- Bumblebee-  alone and intact. Neither happens in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.  The yellow robot is rendered inoperative early in Beasts and spends the vast majority of the running time  rusting in suspended animation in various background shots.

Without the Bee in its bonnet, Beasts spins its wheels  trying to generate sympathy for it newest members— a King Kong gorilla bot named Optimus Primal,  a motor mouthed silver Porsche-Mirage, an eroticized female bot with a flashy red exterior- Arcee— and not really succeeding.  The Beasts, a cheetah mech, and a sly mcguffin nod  that points to The Maltese Falcon never rise above solemn incantations of wisdom and doom.  The fights and action scenes, which are pretty much the same Transformers battles shuffled around, make this prequel a failed reboot attempt.

Beasts promises a re-evolution of the franchise but delivers a throwback, a  de-evolution. If they had kept  Bumblebee and killed off Optimus Prime, allowing the yellow mech to become the new autobot leader, then the series would have created one giant step for a new destiny.   But five writers can’t think of such true lunacy.