Really? Did they not take notes from Bumblebee?

Score: 2/5

Transformers as a film franchise has been a strange one. It’s never been “more than meets the eye.” In the early days though, the video game over-the-top action sequences were not as prevalent as they are today. So as Marvel started to build something interesting with the MCU, the Transformers movies didn’t have a leg to stand in if they didn’t start coming up with a better story than just standard Saturday morning cartoon fare.

Well, that didn’t happen until 2018’s Bumblebee. They scaled back the stakes, they gave the human partner something of a character arc, and there was some heart to the story. It was also a reboot of sorts from everything that came before. A smart producer would say, let’s build from that! Instead, they went back to the old formula, and it just doesn’t work anymore.

Rise of the Beasts is bland. It lacks anything charming that came from Bumblebee and repeats old arcs from past Transformers movies that made me think, did the writers and producers have amnesia? Its only new idea in the action departments was finding an anime-like solution to include the humans in the big final fight of the movie. Instead of coming off as this epic moment, it felt like I was watching the old Spy Kids movies.

I don’t want to crap on the visual effects departments because it’s clear they were short-staffed and rushed, but it was hard to watch this and not wonder what are producers thinking anymore? Did nostalgia convince me to watch this movie because I loved the Beast Wars cartoon as a kid? Yes, but that shouldn’t have given the green light to go backward on useful information learned throughout the tumbling of this franchise into the ground. The movie even attempts to create a new cinematic universe that feels destined to never come, like the various attempts to make a shared Universal Monsters movie-verse.

A weak story, with shoddy visual action, and forced universe-building, Rise of the Beasts hits the trifecta of everything not to do with big-budget movies. It might be time for Paramount and Hasbro to give up on these movies because they just don’t work anymore, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone waste their time or money to watch them if this is the new bar of quality for the franchise.