The shiny, tinny, explodo-driven popcorn-drek series that chewed up and spat out the dignity of Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Glynn Turman from The Wire, and Stanley Tucci’s Merlin is back! And it’s more toyetic than ever! Gone are the lumbering, turgid, 100,000-piece jigsaw monstrosities that didn’t resemble the cartoons of our youth, by which I mean Michael Bay’s poorly “written”, billions-earning quintilogy and its intricately hollow CG animated stars. The robot designs are simpler, the thin characters are thinner, the exotic location shoots are fewer, the camera’s male gaze is less lecherous, and the filmmakers remembered how Hasbro’s former key demographic — i.e., The Children — used to think these things were cool. That faint marketing memory lives on through director Steven Caple, Jr. (Creed II, the least ambitious and pretty-okayest of that great trilogy) and five (!) credited writers, who, along two multinational companies’ worth of corporate overlords, have decided our alien car-robot heroes should make some new alien animal-robot friends!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for my son and me, seeing every Transformers film in theaters, no matter how much we’ve come to dread them, is among our few enduring father/son traditions. He was 12 when Chapter 1 hit theaters and enthralled him with a surprisingly baseline watchability for a Michael Bay film. He grew up as they grew bigger and dumber, reaching their sea-level pinnacle with Chapter 3, Dark of the Moon, which I would argue is underrated if I cared to argue Transformers film quality online, which is as useful a philosophical activity as debating which brands of olive loaf are least fetid. The subsequent compromise of replacing Shia LaBeouf while retaining Bay gave us Chapter 4, Age of Extinction, which was better than the manic landfill that was Chapter 2, Revenge of the Fallen (a low bar easily tripped over), but it also led to the worst one ever — Chapter 5, The Last Knight, a 155-minute fusillade of aggravating fireworks that proved no one was actually proofreading or even reading the “screenplays” for these things.

Nevertheless, the boy and I would suffer each canned serving of Cinema In Name Only and always spend the car ride home dissecting them together. I watched the ’80s cartoon; he watched the ’90s stuff I’ve never seen. We had our own generational contexts, but tended to hold similar opinions on each one. The last one, Travis Knight’s 2018 reboot/prequel Bumblebee, was a bit too nostalgic for my tastes, but it was several steps up from its now-decanonized forerunners and humbly implied a brighter future might lie in store for Cybertron’s clunky warriors. That future has arrived with its sequel, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, but it’s not so bright and nobody needs to wear shades unless they’re hoping no one recognizes them when they leave the theater.

Seven years have passed and the Autobots are still on Earth in 1994, laying low and somehow largely staying off the American military’s radar, with their frenemies at Section 7 nowhere in sight, least of all its past alumni like John Cena and John Turturro. (When Bay left, he took the U.S. Department of Defense’s endorsements, cooperation, and macho recruitment-ad posturing with him.) But the ostensible Robots in Disguise are called to action once more by commander Optimus Prime (still voiced by Peter Cullen, the series’ lone indefatigable mainstay), who’s detected a long-forgotten, never-before-mentioned MacGuffin called the Transwarp Key revealing itself on Earth. Our Heroes must find it before it’s acquired by their mortal enemies — not the usual Decepticons, but a totally different faction called the Terrorcons, which are a thing now. These animal-shaped baddies serve at the whims of the gargantuan planet-eating mega-giganto-robot overlord Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo from Fear the Walking Dead), who could use the Transwarp Key to wormhole his way toward our digestible Earth instead of taking the long way to get here for doomsday-machine dinner. Who can blame him for wanting to save a few light-years’ worth of fuel?

(This X-Men-ish rewrite is when we officially, unambiguously bade farewell to Bay’s continuity. Remember when The Last Knight revealed Earth was actually Unicron? No, you don’t, you LIAR. Anyway, that’s all gone. Sidious is still Palpatine, but Unicron is no longer Earth. Works for me.)

In lieu of Section 7 or any real human authorities, Our Heroes make two (2) human friends to help them save the day. Enter Anthony Ramos, so great in both the original Hamilton cast and the film adaptation of In the Heights, who’s given roughly five minutes to inhabit his character, a Brooklynite named Noah who teaches kiddie viewers that the job hunt can be hard out there even for a decorated veteran like himself when his C.O., commendations notwithstanding, gives him a bad reference and calls him “unreliable” without explanation. Noah of course has a loving family who needs his support, but now he also has a small robot army who need him to help save billions of lives. And you can’t pay the bills if you, your debtors and your prospective employers are all grist between a robot overlord’s nation-sized gear-teeth.

Also along for the ride is Dominique Fishback, so great in HBO’s Show Me a Hero and Judas and the Black Messiah (someone buy me an Amazon Prime subscription and I’ll be happy to watch her in Swarm). She gets three minutes to set up her Brooklyn antiquities expert named Elena, who has the mutant superpower to discern whether a given relic is real or fake merely by side-eying it. She teaches kiddie viewers how lousy it feels to have a dimwitted boss who takes credit for all your profitable insights while ignoring your graver concerns. She works at an architecturally grandiose, fossil-filled Natural History Museum on Ellis Island (which definitely didn’t exist upon our visit sixteen years later), where a recently acquired anachronism may just be the MacGuffin that could spell doom for all humanity…or let Optimus Prime and his subordinates hitch a ride home.

Noah enters the fray when he sublimates his job-hunt frustrations by trying to steal a Porsche from a gated upper-class garage, only to realize he’s not sticking it to the 1%; he’s gouging an Autobot. Several awkward moments and one car chase later, now he’s friends with Mirage, voiced by ex-SNLer Pete Davidson as the film’s funniest player when he isn’t reduced to basic car puns. (No one asks how or why a Porsche with no owner infiltrated a high-security garage that otherwise has nothing to do with anything except an easy crowd-pandering moment of “rich people suck lol”.) Unlike every other Transformer we’ve ever seen in live-action, Mirage is flexible enough change into multiple shapes, not just the one product-placement car model. His adaptability facilitates a crucial point in the climax that’s supposed to impress kids with the ingenuity of something never tried before in all the Transformers multiverse, but left me wondering if any of the execs behind Shane Black’s The Predator are now working at Paramount and ordered the Caple company to recycle the one half-baked idea they brought along.

After the fast and furious Brooklyn street race, the villains deign to show up from beyond even though they don’t have the Transwarp Key yet. They’re led by Unicron’s head henchman Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage), all of them in animal forms, who quickly bring the EXPLOSIONS to Ellis Island and drag Elena into the forefront. Robots fight and fight and fight before pausing to let Noah and Elena be humans for another thirty seconds while bonding over superficial essentials. They’re both from Brooklyn, they both love Tony’s Pizza (an actual Brooklyn joint, cited address and all), and they’re both enduring the sort of intense experiences that Speed warned us about. Then they go back to being tiny, fragile, plot-driven assistants to the regional Autobot manager.

The MacGuffin hunt leads to Cusco, Peru, fifty miles southeast of famous Machu Picchu, because someone thought it looked cool. (They’re not wrong, but still: Peru?) The outnumbered, despairing Autobots stumble over their new friends promised in the title: the Maximals! They’re animals like the Terrorcons, display little teamwork or fond acquaintanceship, and barely interact with one another. In that sense they’re no less disjointed than the Autobots, who’ve generally been little more than collections of sidekicks orbiting around Optimus Prime’s magnetic hero-boss. Whereas the Autobots have Cullen’s semi-truck alter-ego, the Maximals are led by Ron Perlman voicing Optimus Primal, who’s named after Prime himself, just one aspect of the rather complicated relationship between then that is 100% not appearing in this film. (My son tried explaining Beast Wars to me on the way to the theater. Apparently their convoluted backstory involves time travel. I thank Caple this is never brought up.) Primal mostly bellows and thumps his chest in lieu of any definable “leading”, but kids who love giant apes or giant robots will love his deep-throated Mecha-Kong. ’90s kids who wonder if he’ll shout his trademark catchphrase (“Maximals…maximize!“) will die giddily and unsurprised when that moment arrives.

Amid the narrow streets, a conveniently timed costume parade, and some gorgeous Andes Mountains cinematography, the MacGuffin chase and robot fights and escalating ludicrousness lead to an impractically designed cavern (Noah dutifully pop-culture-refs the its famously fedora’d knockoff source, a fellow Paramount IP) (how did oversized robots build or even utilize an ancient Peruvian underground cavern beset with a single stone sarcophagus? SHUT UP, that’s how), which in turn leads to the Final Battle atop the darkened peaks of Peruvian Mordor accompanied by a scattered Pillar of Light-show and overstuffed from frame to frame with Unicron’s suddenly infinite lookalike CG army that grows rather tiresome with the same calculated busyness that ends too many summer blockbusters. The pandemonium bears little in the way of style and was probably orchestrated in the MCU Method — i.e., directed by the visual effects department but rubber-stamped for approval by the credited director.

A few saving graces light the otherwise well-worn robo-path. Optimus Prime fans will dig the return of his vicious-warrior mode as he goes full Wolverine in the Final Battle. Davidson’s Mirage really is more entertaining than anyone here, and gets away with one line that probably helped goose the film up to its PG-13 rating. Its pieces of ’90s nostalgia flair (like Noah and kid brother nicknaming each other “Sonic” and “Tails”) are less in-your-face than Bumblebee‘s We Love the ’80s overkill, unless you count the soundtrack’s booming rap-battle K-Tel collection, which gets us cranky older viewers through some tedious stretches with the likes of “The Choice is Yours”, “Mama Said Knock You Out”, and more more more. Sometimes I was bopping along to the jams instead of paying attention to the action.

And it’s cool that two deserving actors like Ramos and Fishback hopefully earned tidy paychecks for putting as much of their hearts as they could into their human-placeholder roles. They do their part to save Earth, but they can’t quite save the entire film from all its toyetic, wheel-spinning mediocrity. Rise of the Beasts is still better than Transformers Chapters 2, 4, or 5, but it pitches so much debris at the viewer’s senses, and so very little of it makes anything here feel like it’s “more than meets the eye”.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh tries to stand out among the other Maximals as she imbues the robo-falcon Airazor with as much kindly imperiousness as she can, but her basso profundo costars outnumber her and ultimately crowd her out. Other robot voices include supreme roboteer John DiMaggio (Futurama), Beast Wars veteran David Sobolov, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez (Tick, Tick…Boom!), and Ted Lasso‘s Cristo Fernández.

Among the few other humans, most recognizable is New York Undercover‘s Luna Lauren Vélez, now best known as the voice of Miles Morales’ mom in the Spider-Verse films. Kudos to her for possibly becoming the first actress to play a Concerned Mother in two different back-to-back #1 films at the U.S. box office.

But wait! There’s more…

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene during the Transformers: Rise of the Beasts end credits. For those who couldn’t hold on for thirty measly seconds into those credits but really want to know, and didn’t already click elsewhere…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…the scene during the credits is no big deal: Noah shows his coworker Reek (rapper/actor Tobe Nwigwe) how he’s taken lots of disparate auto parts and kludged up some repairs on his new BFF Mirage, who did indeed survive the Final Battle. Reek is new to whole giant-robot thing and just stands there with a red Twizzler™ dangling from his mouth. That’s it, that’s the whole scene during the credits.

What’s made millions of jaws drop and foreheads get self-slapped is the final scene before the end credits even begin. After the Final Battle, Noah nets himself yet another job interview, this time in a plain conference room with a polite bureaucrat played by Michael Kelly, perhaps best known as ruthless killer toady Doug Stamper from Netflix’s House of Cards. (I first noticed him in the found-footage superhero thriller Chronicle as Dane DeHaan’s alcoholic dad, but that’s just me.)

This gent, one Agent Burke, knows all about the Peruvian fracas and the various metallic aliens that Noah fought beside over the past two hours. He tells Noah his top-secret government organization could use a man of his skills. As he hands Noah a business card, the back wall of the room retracts to reveal a top-secret military base filled with an assortment of toyetic weapons and vehicles. As he elevates away to other business, Noah flips the business card over to reveal the G.I. Joe logo.

Congrats, Mr. Diaz: you’ve just entered the Hasbro Cinematic Universe!

(I would’ve been far more entertained if the logo on the back had read “Underwood, Inc.”)