The other night, I was able to watch the block screening of the 4th installment of Michael Bay's Transformers movie series, Age of Extinction. As I've expected in this movie, a lot of Bayformer haters out there expected the movie sucked or other people who already watched the film didn't liked it.

As a Transfan myself, I wanna give this movie another chance to see if its good or not. To tell you frankly, the movie wasn't so bad, its slight better than the last sequel, Dark of the Moon. But there are a lot of plot holes or loose ends in this movie that needs to be explained. As much I want to do some spoilers about the movie, I'm not going to do that since a lot of you haven't watched it, so I'm doing a spoiler-free review why Age of Extinction has a few hits and a lot of misses.

Since this is a Michael Bay film, and as expected from him, there's a lot of action, explosions (most of them are), annoying humor and women in this film. As we all know, Age of Extinction is not a reboot of the Transformers franchise as first earlier rumored, but rather a continuity where the last sequel left off. Much has changed in this movie, most especially the Autobots, where their character tone changed drastically since Dark of the Moon, they're more meaner and became loose cannons as they fight for their survival.

As with the previous sequels, they have introduced another plot line to the more ever complexed story, which opened more plot holes. Sadly, some of these holes that needs to be explained, like when, how or why this happened. The story got more complicated than ever, so complicated that it became a total mess. Even introducing another terminology in the franchise got a lot more annoying. Though some of the plots did explained and I understood most of it, it didn't help in making the movie better.

Its nice to see a new bunch of cast joined in this film, some of them have their best performances like Kelsey Grammer and Stanley Tucci, even they have little screen time. The film's star Mark Wahlberg as the hunky inventor Cade Yeager did good on his role in the film, but it wasn't helpful in making this film better. As for the rest of the cast, they're just decorations and they suck.

As for the voice actors in the film, John Goodman did very good voicing Hound, he's a total badass with the role. Though Ken Watanabe as the sword-weilding Autobot Drift did ok for me, a lot of people hated Watanabe's role because of his accent which most of the viewers think its racial. For cryin' out loud, Drift's design is a Samurai bot and it speaks in Japanese accent so its a fitting role for Watanabe, so I don't see any racial tones with this one.

For the action sequences in this film, well this has tons of it. The CG graphics on the bots are superb and more detailed. Even sleeker designs of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Crosshairs looked good. Its nice to see a lot of bot action and it seems they've balanced the screen time most of the characters, human or bot, which is enjoyable to watch. However, the movie has too many climatic and useless scenes, clearly that needs to be minimized. What I don't like in this film is a slew of quick shot advertisements flashing on screen in some of the action scenes. Chevorlet already is the major sponsor in this film, so why the needless moving billboard of products, just to get customers? That's so lame.

Overall, the film wasn't so bad, though it raised a bar a little compared to Dark of the Moon, but no matter how Bay raise the bar on his movies, it still lacks the formula that he had success in the first film. Clearly, he needs to get the plot line fixed and some of the useless scenes removed, if he plans directing again for the 5th installment which is rumored Paramount already gave the green light on the next sequel.

My rating on Transformers: Age of Extinction, 3.5 out of 5.