《变形金刚4：绝迹重生》

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Sophia Myles, Li Bingbing

Director: Michael Bay

Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci head a completely new (human) cast in Michael Bay’s fourth installment of the intergalactic robot film series.

“THE age of the Transformers is over,” announces counterintelligence agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) in the fourth entry of the Paramount/Hasbro-backed fighting-robots film series.

    Some viewers, though, will probably side with Attinger as they leave theaters after “Transformers: Age of Extinction” finally draws to a close. True, there’s a lot of state-of-the-art 3D chicanery, and the film is a marked improvement over the wholesale inhuman chaos of the last two installments, 2009’s “Revenge of the Fallen” and 2011’s “Dark of the Moon.” But the bloat of this latest entry — at 165 minutes, the longest of the lot — suggests that Michael Bay and his team are struggling to rejuvenate the whole premise.

    Sadly, “Age of Extinction” is neither controversial nor disturbing, but mostly just dull and middling — which is just so not done with a sci-fi action blockbuster designed to blast and titillate. It has neither the first film’s sporadic comedic pleasures born of the interactions between its humans and robots, nor does it attain the hyper-sensationalism that makes the second and third installments utterly over-the-top showcases of gratuitous demolition.

    Though converging fanboys may not tune in to “The Searchers” or “2001: A Space Odyssey” homages, they should connect to the broad sentiments shaping “Age of Extinction”: that times are tough, the government is bad, and men (and only men) should fight for their heath, home and automobile. All this is embodied in Bay’s new protagonist, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg). Yeager is a broke Texan who gets into trouble buying a patched-up truck he intends to dismantle and sell off to pay the rent and future college fees of his daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz).

    But the vehicle is none other than Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), the leader of the Autobots. Set several years after “Dark of the Moon,” in which the Decepticons were defeated by the human-robot alliance, Optimus and his world-saving colleagues have been shunned by those in power for being a threat. They are hunted down by Black Ops squadrons led by Attinger and Captain Savoy (Titus Welliver), not to mention the harrowing Decepticon bounty hunter Lockdown (voiced by Mark Ryan). Their patriotic veneer naturally conceals a darker motive — they are hocking parts of the captured robots to Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci), a Steve Jobs-like egomaniac hoping to build “better” Transformers.

    What follows is a de rigueur runaround as the good guys (with Tessa now joined by her race car-driver boyfriend, Shane, played by Jack Reynor) are caught and freed a couple of times in the midst of screaming and carnage. They then travel to Hong Kong, where they join their robot friends in pursuit of Joyce and his dangerous energy source.

    Being the only character whose personality arc actually changes within the film, Tucci is given a wealth of opportunities to ham it up, just like John Turturro, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand have done before; his clownish antics while racing for survival in a Hong Kong tenement block are probably the highlight of the film. Unfortunately, Wahlberg is given far less space to maneuver. His troubled interactions with Tessa and barbed exchanges with Shane are cliched or underwritten, and his ability to morph into a bazooka-wielding warrior limits his register further.

    Though basically superfluous, the last 40 minutes of the film should please the Chinese co-financiers, including the China Movie Channel, as well as the authorities. For a change, there are no Chinese villains and the one significant local character, Joyce’s English-speaking deputy Su Yueming (Li Bingbing), is presented as a swish executive and a dexterous fighter who saves her American boss. The fictional Chinese defense minister can also be heard proclaiming the country’s ability to protect Hong Kong, as he promises to send fighter jets to the city in a show of Beijing’s military might.

    Belying its ominous title, “Age of Extinction” barely skirts the idea that humankind and planet Earth are about to be totally annihilated. What is extinguished is the audience’s consciousness after being bombarded for nearly three hours with overwrought emotions, bad one-liners and battles that rarely rise above the banal. A trio of editors make a technical marvel out of the fight scenes, but can do little to link the story’s multiple threads into something coherent.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.(SD-Agencies)