Nobody asked me for this, but I felt like I had to tell someone.

What’s It About? Optimus Prime joins forces with a scrappy inventor from Texas to fight back against a shadow organization that has been hunting the Autobots.

STRAIGHT UP: Tone-deaf and underwritten. Exceptionally bad. 2/10

What I Liked

Mark Wahlberg – I didn’t much care for Wahlberg’s character, Cade Yeager, who’s problematic on a couple of different levels. But Wahlberg himself is an asset to this film, bringing the right kind of affect to the screen.

New Transformers designs – Optimus and friends have never looked this good before. All of the robots have been redesigned with brighter, cleaner, more visually-distinct looks that totally work. The producers have also assembled a varied, interesting group of vehicles to serve as the Transformers’ alternate forms, including a Lamborghini Aventador and a Pagani Huayra.

What I Disliked

Half-baked characters – The characters in this film have no consistency. Cade is a failed inventor who can’t even build a simple robot, but he can reverse-engineer CIA tech and repair Transfomers with ease. A key villain becomes a hero halfway through with no buildup at all. The human character Shane gets a heroic debut, then becomes a walking punchline for almost two hours. The Autobot Crosshairs hints at turning traitor, then forgets about it. I’ve never seen a film fail so badly at fundamental character-building.

Awful script – There are some really cringe-worthy lines in this one. The characters call each other “bitch” and “a-hole” with such frequency that I felt like I was watching a Call of Duty livestream.

Too many subplots – Somewhere in here is the seed of an effective action movie plot: “Tech genius is hunting Transformers and using their scrap metal to make man-made versions; Optimus and friends need to set him straight.” But it gets lost under a ton of unwieldy subplots involving alien bounty hunters, CIA conspiracies, military contracts, creator-god myths, and the rebirth of Megatron. A couple of times, I lost track of who was fighting who, and why.

Bad racial stereotypes – I figured that the people behind these movies had learned their lesson after the backlash against the Skidz and Mudflap characters from the second film. Apparently not, as the Autobot Drift (voiced by Ken Watanabe, of all people) is basically a walking Japanese samurai caricature.

Tessa Yeager – The only things Cade’s daughter gets to do in this film are be in danger and be a trophy for Cade and Shane to have macho-fights over. What’s worse, the film takes great pains to remind us that she’s “only 17 years old” while repeatedly making her the subject of some salacious camera shots. (That’s a weird message to send.) It’s 2014, and this is an embarrassing way to treat a female character.

The Gunblade – At one point, Cade stumbles into an alien arms locker and grabs the only thing he can carry – a (relatively) small gunblade, presumably a Transformer sidearm. However, this “sidearm” is the most destructive weapon in the entire movie, capable of one-shot kills and dismemberments while never, ever running out of ammo. Who needs verisimilitude?

Misused Dinobots – The Dinobots appear for about 10 minutes to participate in the movie’s final smash-em-up, then leave. Their origins are never explained, and none of them speak a word. I was looking forward to seeing Grimlock, and now I feel like I’ve been cheated.

CLOSING THOUGHT: Listen. I honestly enjoyed the first Transformers film, and liked parts of the last one. I had my reasons for believing this one would be the best of the bunch. But Age of Extinction is dead on arrival: riddled with problems on both the conceptual and technical levels, so committed to its own awfulness that I am actually in awe of it. This film is transcendently bad. Spectacularly bad. Hilariously bad. It’s probably the worst movie that I will allow myself to see this year, and by rights it should be a franchise-killer.