Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the seventh film in the big screen Transformers franchise, serving as both a prequel and soft reboot of sorts to the five Michael Bay movies, and it’s one of the more watchable entries in the series, at least.

While it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel for this franchise, and still essentially offers more of the same in terms of giant metal CGI creations smashing into each other, it’s also presented in a somewhat easier to digest package.

Directed by Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II), Transformers: Rise of the Beasts feels streamlined from the other films, stripping away a lot of the “Bayhem” (as well as the more overt sexualization and crass humour) to offer a more straight-forward action adventure movie.

It’s still a Transformers movie, to be sure, with all of the cheeseball dialogue and convoluted, inherently ridiculous mythology that comes with it. But, at just over two hours, it’s one that doesn’t leave us with the same sort of headache. Chronologically, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts follows the 1980s-set spin-off Bumblebee (which remains in the best in the series), with the action this time around being set in the 1990s.

The nostalgic ’90s setting (and old school hip-hop soundtrack) provides a fitting backdrop for what amounts to a more simple and mildly entertaining big screen outing for the Hasbro toys. The main human is Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos), an ex-military electronics expert in New York who is struggling to support his family, including single mother Breanna (Luna Lauren Vélez) and younger brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez), who is chronically ill and requires expensive medical appointments.

Noah gets talked into trying to steal a Porsche, which turns out to be an Autobot named Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson). This in turn sucks Noah into a battle between the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), and the Terrorcons, led by Scourge (Peter Dinklage) and their supreme leader Unicron (Colman Domingo), for the Transwarp Key, a device that opens portals between worlds. The other human character is Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback), a museum intern who discovers an artifact containing part of the key, sending them all on a globe-trotting adventure.

The film also introduces the Maximals, machine-animal hybrids from the Transformers: Beast Wars cartoon series, into the live action cinematic universe, led by a sort of mechanical silverback gorilla named Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) and falcon warrior Airazor (Michelle Yeoh). The film does try to develop its human characters a bit more, and doesn’t quite do enough to fully satisfy in this regard. But at least it’s trying, and you don’t really go to a Transformers movie for serious character development.

If it sounds like I’m damning Rise of the Beasts with faint praise, it’s because I sort of am. It’s still basically two hours of action figures clanging together, and it’s often hard to ignore the toy commercial feel of it (especially at the end). The film still devolves into a massive CGI battle in its last act, but the action is at least somewhat cleaner and easier to follow this time around. Ramos also makes for a more charismatic lead, and has some fun banter with Davidson’s Mirage. In short, it’s not the worst version of this type of movie, and should satisfy kids in particular.