Warning: Some mild spoilers from Transformers: Age of Extinction follow…

Transformers: Age of Extinction delivers essentially everything one would expect from a Transformers movie; both the good and the bad – and plenty of it. Michael Bay introduces his “redesigned” take on the morphing bots in a film that seeks to exceed its predecessors in scale, global scope, and runtime…certainly runtime. Depending on your perspective, that is either an attractive or entirely repellent proposition.

As anyone who’s been on the Internet, watched TV, or gone to the cinema recently knows, the basic premise is that failed robotics engineer Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) “finds a Transformer” – Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) himself, in fact – while he’s hunting through junk. Unfortunately, the government, via Kelsey Grammer’s villainous Harold Attinger, has declared an unofficial war on the alien shape-shifters. The Earth-saving Autobots are not excluded from the search and execution crusade. Cade, his 17-year-old daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), best friend/assistant Lucas (T.J. Miller), and Tessa’s secret lover/professional race-car driver Shane (Jack Reynor) get caught in the crossfire between Attinger’s minions – the most vicious of whom is the ruthless Savoy (Titus Welliver) – and the fleeing Autobot leader.

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