For all intents and purposes, every sign points to Michael Bay and the Transformers series going their separate ways after The Last Knight. Bay even wrote a goodbye letter to the franchise thanking everyone involved for five movies’ worth of explosions, robots fighting each other, and female characters introduced from the legs up. But there’s one person who thinks he might be faking it.
The new Transformers movie is all about buried secrets. Texan Bostonian inventor bro Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and brainy Oxford professor Vivian Frumplebumple (okay I admit it: I didn’t catch her last name so I made that up) discover a world they never knew: The hidden history of Transformers on Earth. It turns out the Transformers have played a role in every armed conflict throughout time. The Transformers helped King Arthur, and they threw an assist to the Allies during World War II. There’s more to meets the eye in those history books, doncha know.
When making a movie about any real historical tragedy, especially if it’s recent, there’s an onus on the people behind the project to be true to the material. No one in Hollywood, save for maybe the Afflecks, loves Boston more than Mark Wahlberg, and he’s said before that his prime concern with making Patriots Day, a drama about the Boston Marathon bombings, is “getting it right.” A new trailer before this week’s release of the film hammers that point home even further, with footage from the movie intercut with statements from the real people who were there that day.
After earning huge laughs with their whiskey-and-water dynamic in 2010's The Other Guys, Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell reteam for a comedy that puts a hilarious spin on the emotional fallout of divorce.