FILM REVIEW: BUMBLEBEE MEETS THE BREAKFAST CLUB… AN INSTANT 80S CLASSIC

Director Travis Knight infuses an ’80s-style “magical friend” movie with great action and splendid characters (including the damn robots!)

11 years since Michael Bay took the reins of the live-action “Transformers” movies, and in that time he has infused these films with a particular, great, but somewhat at times, his cinematic storytelling is a car-crash, (imagine, riding a roller-coaster in a war zone being catapulted through a solar system). His approach has its fans, but with “Bumblebee,” we can finally see what a filmmaker other than Michael Bay could do with the concept of alien machines that transform into stuff.

And it turns out they could do wonders.

Directed by Travis Knight (“Kubo and the Two Strings”), is the best “Transformers” movie so far, going all the way back to the 1986 animated film.

PLOT DETAILS:

“Bumblebee” kicks off on the planet Cybertron, a massive technological wonder where a civilization of sentient robots is in the middle of a brutal civil war. Optimus Prime (voiced, as always, by Peter Cullen) signals a hasty retreat for his Autobot resistance and commands his soldier B-127 (voiced by Dylan O’Brien, Maze Runner, and MTV’s Teen Wolf fame) to flee to Earth to prepare the planet to become the Autobots’ new base of operations.

B-127 lands in the middle of a military exercise, led by Agent Jack Burns (action-wrestler-turned-Hollywood-movie-star John Cena), which immediately turns into a robot hunt, as the poor alien races through the forest, desperately trying to evade capture.

And just when it seems like he might be able to reason with these humans, a Decepticon called Blitzwing arrives, blows everyone to hell, rips out B-127’s voice box, and leaves our hero broken, his memory erased, and before he powers down, injured and weak, he spots a 1967 V.W. Beetle — the original B.B. vehicle from the Saturday morning cartoons — and shape-shifts appropriately.

Sometime later on, that planet called Earth, in the San Francisco Bay-area…

Enter Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld, going way above and beyond the call of duty), a misfit with a chip on her shoulder (dead father, miserable heart-felt emotions, some serious air-drumming chops and an endless supply of band t-shirts.

She has to deal with the usual teenager problems circa the end of the Reagan Era: a shitty summer job at Hot Dog on a Stick, a bunch of stuck-up rich snobs making her feel like trash, a home life that sucks, a desperate need for a car.

Her off hours are spent working on a car that she and her late dad were trying to restore, or searching the local auto yard for spare parts. She discovers a beat-up, yellow Volkswagen. She starts it up and drives it home. It’s when Charlie gets the chugging contraption home, however, that the real birthday surprise takes place. One transformation later, (ta-da, you guessed right!) What happens next is genuine, honest-to-Optimus human-based drama.

ABOVE: Pamela Adlon, John Cena, and Stephen Schneider in Bumblebee

THE PLAYERS:

(“True Grit” star Hailee Steinfeld), Charlie Watson, a young woman who listens to The Smiths, resents her mom (“Better Things” star Pamela Adlon), has a large, mute mecha-amnesiac in her garage and we have a good old-fashioned a-girl-and-her-robot-pal tale on our hands.

Charlie loves her family, but honestly, she’s ready to get away from home. She can’t quite understand how her mom has been able to move on and get a new boyfriend, she doesn’t really relate to her tween brother, and she hates feeling disconnected from everything. All that said, though, the film makes it clear that the ties that bind us to our family are strong ones, especially when the chips are down.

Throughout the movie, we have some tentative romantic bonding between Charlie and a nerdy neighbor named Memo (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and sensitive, not-at-all sappy Y.A. drama. Lendeborg’s Memo isn’t a credible nerd, despite the way he breathlessly explains why he wears disposable hair nets (sanitary reasons) when he’s confronted by a vaguely threatening valley girl bully.

And John Cena—playing cranky-pants, anti-robot military guy Agent Burns—isn’t a believable trigger-happy villain, despite the scary scar on his cheek, but Cena does have fantastic and hilarious lines throughout, though.

8OS REFERENCES GALORE:

“Bumblebee” is more or less: an ’80s coming-of-age story that just happens to have a Transformer in it. There are in-jokes regarding the era’s pop-culture cheese whiz and callbacks for fans.

The screenplay by Christina Hodson (“Unforgettable”) embraces the familiar structure of every classic “magical friend” movie, from “E.T.” all the way to “The Breakfast Club,” and the actors are having a ball reimagining the ever youthful 80s troupe.

ROBOT MAYHEM:

As you’d likely expect, the robotic battles on CGI display here can certainly be big, bombastic, perilous-looking and explosive. Scores of Transformers smash and bash each other in the film’s opening moments and later on, too. Explosives detonate. Large objects and blades slam into and through metal foes. And we witness many robots being crushed, slashed, sliced in half and ripped apart. Robotic arms get snapped off, and their inner workings are torn out with force. Several times we watch robot fighters either explode into pieces or get torn asunder.

The Decepticons are painted as vicious, vindictive liars who actually enjoy hurting and tormenting their foes. Bumblebee has his voice box ripped out by a sharp object. Large harpoons pierce his body, tying him down with heavy steel cables. He’s hung up by chains in what appears to have been a torture session of some sort (offscreen). He’s also pummeled and beaten, his metal body clanking and screeching from the blows, and then hit with a devastating laser blast.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Ok, we’re not sure, exactly, how to say this. It’s, um … well … right, fine [deep breath]. We’ll just say it.

Bumblebee…

IS the best, and most, fun-loving film in the entire franchise by a long shot, and more. The movie asks viewers to fall in love with Bumblebee, a character who (in this film) appears to be a cuddly VW but is in fact, a war machine? (We can live with the fact), because the film thrives on emotions and us, the viewers, caring for Charlie and her pal. It holds up as a fun, family-appropriate movie on its own terms, and redeems its beleaguered franchise in the process.

5/5 STARS