Remember the feeling when you first saw Optimus Prime who, in his booming voice, declared “I am Optimus Prime” in Transformers? Well Optimus Prime still hasn’t lost the magic despite the last two disaster sequels but it seems that Prime and his Autobots are holding on by a thread.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is Bayhem at its best. Michael Bay does what he does best in the best way possible (blow things up), the increasingly annoying Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky) is replaced (good riddance) by a much more acceptable Mark Wahlberg, and the bots are as cool as ever but it is time to steal the AllSpark of the franchise and put an end to it.

The film starts four years after the incidents of Dark of the Moon, and sees CIA agent Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer) hunting down all Autobots and Decepticons as enemies of humanity. The Autobots have gone into hiding. Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) is a broke inventor/mechanic who buys a dilapidated truck that he can sell for parts. The truck turns out to be none other than Optimus. Instead of turning him in as the government wants, Cade fixes him up. But the government locates him and the chase begins with Cade, and in turn, his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz) and her rally-car driver boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor) throwing in their lot with the Autobots.

5 reasons why you should watch it

If you are a fan of Michael Bay-style mayhem — with spectacular car crashes, explosions, slo-mo action, explosions, bot-on-bot action, explosions, seamless car-to-bot transformations, oh, did we mention explosions — then this film will make you very happy. It is a visual delight.

There are some cool new Autobots and the cars they turn into are cooler. Ken Watanabe’s Drift is a haiku-quoting samurai warrior who uses a helicopter blade as a sword and his alt-modes are a chic black and blue 2013 Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse (ceetee) and an attack helicopter! Crosshairs (John DiMaggio) is a cynical paratrooper who believes the humans deserve what they get. Hound (John Goodman) is a big-talking, live-bullet-chomping, trigger-happy, rotund commando who is the new comic factor, apart from Bumblebee (yes, Bee is as adorable as ever), that is.

The new bad guys, well, the one bad guy actually, is cooler. There is Galvatron and Stinger but it is Lockdown, an intergalactic bounty hunter, who makes us go ‘whoa!’. His whole face transforms into a gun, he has missiles that create the coolest explosions and then he turns into this sexy grey 2013 Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 Coupe (taali)!

The dinobots! They are gigantic, can breathe fire and chomp on bots!

Optimus Prime is always a reason to watch the film and this time he rides to battle on a Rex!

some reasons why you should not

It is almost three hours long! That’s too long, even for action, bot buffs.

Both the Autobots and the Decepticons, their transformations and the fighting have become repetitive and fail to thrill.

There is very little human-time in this bot slugfest. I mean that was a boon when the human concerned was Sam Witwicky but Wahlberg’s Cade could have done more. Whatever human-time there is, is a throwback to Bay’s Armageddon with Wahlberg being the overprotective, boyfriend-baiting dad to bombshell daughter Tessa.

Tessa! There has to be that one eye-candy in the film and all they do is scream and be helpless, mostly. It is plain annoying.

The story is just too convoluted and a little too slack. You go ‘who’ and ‘what’ and then you just think ‘never mind’.

The background score! No, more like that one song (or were they different ones?) that played during every big action set piece, was too interfering.

TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION 3D (U/A)
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Nicola Peltz, Jack Reynor, Kelsey Grammer
Running time: 165 minutes