★★½
Maximals finally roll out in director Steven Caple Jr.’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Unfortunately, the various factions of robots in disguise prove too much for Joby Harold (Army of the Dead) when he works with four other writers to turn his workable story into a viable screenplay. In this case, too many cooks made a hot slag mess. What the five authors, who have never worked in the Transformers universe, brought to the table is entertaining but not engaging and a massive disappointment for any Beast Wars fan.
Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is a down-on-his-luck military vet with a sick brother and no way to pay for his care. He joins a heist to steal a Porsche to catch up on the mounting medical bills. But those become the least of his concerns when the car turns out to be Autobot Mirage (Jay Davidson), who recruits Noah to help recover an artifact before Scourge (Peter Dinklage), the minion of planet-eating Unicron (Colman Domingo), gets to it. This caper throws him directly in the path of Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), a museum intern studying the artifact. Now the two must unite with the Autobots and the newly revealed Maximals to prevent the destruction of Earth, the Cybertronian home world, and every planet in the universe.
The story starts entertaining and looks like it is going somewhere. Still, it becomes a train wreck as characters and plotlines are introduced with little fanfare. This is a shame because there are some great players on both sides. While Scourge, as Unicron’s herald, gets a little more time, his motivations for serving are never explored beyond a couple of throwaway lines, so both he and his master remain two-dimensional and uninspiring. The same can be said of the Maximals. Even Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), who gets more lines than any other beast except Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), doesn’t become a character the audience cares much about. Fan favorites Rhinox and Cheetor have so little dialogue that they may as well be two dusty toys perched on a forgotten shelf. After a promising start, the human characters become secondary to the story well before the end. This seems to be because there is a lot of ground to cover and barely enough time to get there. Caple (Creed II) should have fought for a longer running time, or the script should have been divided into two films. Either would have provided a more satisfactory experience.
As with any Transformers movie, there is a lot of activity and even more CGI. While the rendering of the characters is good, the action is often frantic and hard to follow. One particular scene, designed to show everyone on the playing field, whizzes from character to character far too quickly. On the plus side, the musical selections are, much like in Bumblebee, very appropriate, even through sound engineering which sometimes makes it challenging to pick out what some characters are saying. Like the story, some CGI and other technical crew work seems rushed.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is a fun movie for the average moviegoer despite all its problems, as long as viewers aren’t looking for much depth or development. However, fans of any original Transformers show will likely be disappointed if unsurprised. For them, the biggest beast unleashed on the screen is the script that rolls out but never manages to maximize.
