Action figures sold separately. May be a mental choking hazard for viewers over 12.

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!

Continue reading →