Exploding onto screens in 2007, director Michael Bay brought the Transformers toy line to life with a mixture of mayhem and amusement.
The best of the Bay films were screwball comedies seasoned with slapstick and fireballs, glimpsed through a firewall of misogyny and military propaganda. As Mark Wahlberg replaced Shia LaBeouf, the films slipped into greater and greater levels of incoherence.
It was as if Bay declared war on his audience, each action sequence louder and dumber, a cinematic slurry of chaos and flame.
Following 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight, Hasbro and Paramount tried something different. Set in the late ’80s, Bumblebee was basically the answer to “What if E.T. was
