Hollywood’s favourite hack Michael Bay returns to tarnish the childhood memories of Transformers fans once again, with Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Bay’s third sequel to 2007’s Transformers does very little to appease fans and make up for past mistakes, instead preferring to further bastardise and cheapen the beloved 80’s cartoon franchise, anger and disappoint expectant fans in equal measure, and worst of all, make a strong case for summer blockbusters being mindless, brain-melting trash. But then again, did we really expect anything less from the man who bought us Pain & Gain?

Age of Extinction should be better then its predecessors, what with its new cast of characters and a fresh start in terms of the story, a jumping on point for those who aren’t familiar with the franchise’s world. However, we really can’t avoid saying that this is just a terrible, terrible movie. Its list of sins reaches double figures before the end of the first hour (of three), and from then on it just keeps on chugging!

Mark Wahlberg plays Cade Yeager, a leading man so bland and lacking in personality that his name is pretty much the best thing about him. Together with his equally bland daughter (Nicola Peltz) and her one-note stock character boyfriend (Jack Reynor), they end up on the run from the CIA and a sinister Transformer assassin known as Lockdown, after Cade happens to find and restore the fugitive Autobot leader Optimus Prime.

Meanwhile the CIA and a shady entrepreneur (Stanley Tucci) are creating their own breed of manmade Transformers, using ‘Transformium’ (we kid you not!), which they are deriving from the bodies of dead Autobots and Decepticons. Cue lots of giant robot battles between interchangeable characters, some of which get killed off without little dramatic rhyme or reason (probably not selling enough toys).

For the most part, it plays like an overlong chase scene, stretched to a bum-numbing 166 minutes. The plot is for the most part incoherent and clumsily set-up, with various threads awkwardly shoved together. While the visual effects remain at the impressively high standard of the previous three movies and look stunning on the IMAX screen where we saw the movie, action scenes are exhausting as opposed to exhilarating, packed with laughable slow-mo and way too much shaky camerawork.

Actors like Wahlberg mumble through the cliché-ridden, stilted and embarrassing script, desperately searching for some direction (the aforementioned Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer as the film’s main human antagonist lend the film some credibility, but even they are underserved by the lacklustre script and direction).

However, the film’s biggest sin comes down to its use of the Dinobots, the popular prehistoric dinosaur transformers from the cartoon, their appearance here long requested by fans. Sadly, their much advertised presence turns out to be nothing more than a hastily forced and brief appearance in the film’s final 10 minutes, which suffice to say, is both embarrassing and infuriating, especially since most of the film’s marketing has put the focus on these bad-ass monsters. It’s an insult to both the fans and audiences in general, and does little to lend this film much in the way of redemption.

Packed with the usual shameful product placement, racially offensive moments, and unbearable soullessness that we’ve come to expect from these films, Transformers: Age of Extinction insults its audience’s intelligence and tests their patience.

Extinction for this franchise is long overdue. Sadly, we’re already due a fifth instalment in 2017. Fingers crossed for our own extinction before  then!

Released in UK cinemas and IMAX on Saturday 5 July 2014.

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