Movie Nation

Every musical is built around songs of aspiration, “dream songs” in which a character can’t express emotions and hopes in mere words. She or he just has to sing them, maybe do a little dance as she does.

Think of Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” longing for “more than this provincial life,” or everybody in that enchanted castle, in this song or that one, hoping at long last to break the curse.

“Footnotes” is a French musical with nothing but songs of aspiration. And what are the characters singing about? Hopes of finding a job, of keeping a job, of quitting a job and hitting the road.

Here’s a musical everybody can relate to. The dreams are down to Earth, not set in “La La Land.” There’s a chance at love, but it’s not important enough to warrant a song. No, the bigger hopes are of paying the bills, feeding oneself and keeping gas in the moped.

“I have no time to dream,” the struggling working-class 20something Julie may grouse, but we know better.

It’s just that there are limits to our heroine’s dreams. Played with disarming, French-girl-next-door charm by Pauline Etienne, Julie is the face and voice of a global generation, bounced from “McJob” to “McJob” in a cruel, bosses-have-all-the-power economy. Every “try-out” is a scam to get a free day or week’s labor out of the powerless.

We know where she’ll end up thanks to a documentary prologue. Romans, in the Rhone Valley south of Lyon,  is the designer shoe capital of France, a working-class town that cranks out world class shoes for the rich.

And it is at the Jacques Couture factory that Julie finds work, in shipping, and sings of the “bright prospects for eternity,” because getting dumped by her beau and hounded by her bank, she’s at her wit’s end.

But our coquette is barely a day into her probation period hiring when the merde hits the ventilateur. The director of the company, which makes fine women’s footwear, by hand, offhandedly announces planned “upgrades” in a magazine profile.

The French have the best euphemisms. In America, we call it “right-sizing,” or “down-sizing,” all pointing to jobs being sent to China or wherever the labor is cheapest this year.

And the all-female factory workforce sing and dance themselves into a tizzy on the factory floor. “We could go on hunger strike,” they sing in French. “We could kidnap his brat!”

Julie, despite being told to keep her head down and do her job, is caught up in the with the older women, chanting “You will not stitch up the Couture Girls”  as they charter a bus and drive to Paris to confront the self-absorbed big boss, Xavier Laurent (Francois Morel, in smarmy boulevardier mode) in the middle of a shoe fashion show.

Tugging Julie in another direction in the hunky-and-he-knows-it truck driver, Samy (Olivier Chantreau). He smolders when he smokes, and when he sings it’s about following his “Marlboro Man” dream West, to America, with cowboys and Geronimo invading his fantasy.

Julie fights the feeling, but she is smitten.

The co-writer/directors, Paul Calori and Kostia Testut, expand on a short film they made and give us a musical fantasy of accessible dimensions. The tunes are light bossa novas in the French fashion, saucy fight songs and ballads. The voices are pleasant, not ready for “The Voice” or Broadway. The choreography is amusing, relatively simple and to the point.

As is the movie itself. The delightful “Footnotes” is grounded in reality, light on its feet, with just enough intrigues, betrayals and twists to fill 80 brisk minutes with minor delights.

MPAA Rating:unrated, with adult situations, fisticuffs

Cast: Pauline Etienne, Loic Corbery, Clementine Yelnic, Francois Morel, Olivier Chantreau, Julie Victor,

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Calori, Kostia Testut. A Monument release.

Running time: 1:23

A few words, then, in praise of Kirsten Lane, music consultant on films from “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” to “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones’s Baby” and now the musically overloaded “Baby Driver.”

Music is an integral part of the story of Edgar Wright’s film, a movie inspired by the Simon & Garfunkel tune “Baby Driver,” which had nothing to do with a too-too-young getaway driver locked into assorted iPods to get him moving, motivated and putting the pedal to the medal.

It’s just a very cool ingredient to add to the movie, which I think is the best popcorn picture of the summer. 

And of course there’s the tinnitus the kid, “Baby,” says he needs music to drown out.

The tunes run the gamut, such a wide selection of songs that no mere 20-or-so year old possibly have sampled, delved into and become obsessed over in his short time on Earth.

There are classic driving tunes — most on the nose, “Radar Love,” and the not-quite-forgotten instrumental “Hocus Pocus,” by Focus.

Queen’s “Brighton Rock,” Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” (most memorably chasing “The Warriors”), a “Harlem Shuffle” by Bob & Earl, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion turn up.

But soundtracks like this, placed in the iPods of music mad anti-heroes or heroines, always beg the question — It is the character, or the filmmaker’s music taste we’re hearing?

I mean, yeah, The Commodores’ “I’m Easy” is impossible to miss in modern culture. Alexis Corner and Danger Mouse might find their way to your average white 20something.

Blur and Beck (a bit before his time) might catch the driver’s attention. Jonathan Richman? Maybe he stumbled across the King of Quirk in “There’s Something About Mary” and dug around for his other work. But Queen? “Brighton Rock?”

Of course it’s the filmmaker and the music consultant, always older, always wish-fulfillment fantasizing that “kids these days,” with their “infinite playlist” phones, pods, etc., are listening and appreciating everything from classic jazz to classic rock, maybe even a little classical music, to boot.

The late John Hughes, whom I got to interview a few times over the years, was one filmmaker who put all his trust in younger, hipper music consultants, filling the soundtracks of his most famous films with music that came to embody an era in (white) youth culture and music. He wasn’t the hip one, his consultants were.

But check out this track list and tell me how young Baby could have discovered all that, on his on, in this Baby’s few years on Earth? Granted, he isn’t doing much but eating, sleeping, taking meetings with gangs of thieves, making mixtapes and composing his own sampled “tunes” and driving the getaway cars. It’s not like we ever see him practicing/rehearsing his craft. Still, that’s a lot of listening time for such a short lifespan.

Some day, you sense this driver will become his own version of The Star Lord of “Guardians of the Galaxy,” most at home with the singular songs of his youth, that vast repertoire shrinking as he ages out of music hunting, music-buying and movie going.

Roger Moore’s review of “Baby Driver” is here. 

You don’t hear about or see the ramifications of the “Fountain Valley massacre” when you visit St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But there are ghosts there, if you recognize what you’re seeing.

One of the less developed islands, blacker, more segregated and “colonial” in feel, with the influx of the super rich only around the margins, disused cruise ships docks and the like, you have to know some history to get why this “paradise” feels like the Virgin Island that time forgot, or got left behind.

And that history is a bloody, almost Jamaican moment in St. Croix history. In 1972, armed bandits broke into an all-white country club, grabbed a little cash, and shot a lot of white people. The “Fountain Valley massacre,” it was called. And being an island and not a very big one, it wasn’t long before five suspects were rounded up, interrogated and convicted — sentenced to life-and-then-some prison terms.

The Canadian documentary “The Skyjacker’s Tale” tells the story of one of them, Ronald “Ronnie” LaBeet, a radicalized Vietnam War vet who, as Ishmael Muslim Ali, took over an American Airlines flight in 1984 and hijacked it to Cuba, where he lives to this day.

Perhaps only a Canadian could tell this story, or would have attempted it. It’s not just a question of travel and access to Ali/LaBeet. But the whole idea of questioning a mass murder conviction and turning out a compelling movie designed to do little more than cast doubt seems somewhat out of step with the United States these days.

Writer-director Jamie Kastner (“The Secret Disco Revolution”) tracks down those who hunted and prosecuted Ali, a survivor of the massacre and stewardesses, passengers and the pilot of the 1984 New York to Christianstad, St. Croix flight that wound up in Havana.

Kastner sets the stage for the massacre itself, recalling the exploitive, racist culture in the islands of that era. And he lets Ali have his say.

“I am a revolutionary! I am not a criminal!”

Kastner maps the journey of Ronnie LaBeet, from St. Croix boy serving in Vietnam, radicalized by the atrocities he witnessed there,.

“I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t no American,” he recalls.

He came home, became a New York Black Panther, before making his way back to St. Croix, where he was a home island hoodlum, given to robbing tourists and hiding in the rainforest hills afterward.

Naturally, he’s on any short list local authorities whip up when they’re looking for suspects.

He denies having any role in the massacre, but when authorities — Federal marshals and FBI agents among them, drag him and other men accused of the massacre back to the crime scene for “intensive” interrogation, all bets are off.

And after a circus of a trial, with leftist gadfly William Kunstler flying down to mount a “political crime” defense, he and the others were convicted. A dozen years in brutal Federal prisons, with no hope of hearing his voice heard or his claims of a sham trial and police misconduct heard, and Ali was ready to try anything. Being transported to a prison back home was, he says, his chance.

The movie creates a lovely arc for how we think of Ali, from monster to, “Well, maybe not.” But you’re allowed to think the filmmaker is naive, tilting his story toward those on Ali’s side, buttressing a case for his humanity and justifiable skyjacking.

Still, in editing the picture, he captures Ali in a whopper of a contradiction. He says if he’d been allowed to do his time in St. Croix, he never would have tried to hijack a plane, when he was on a plane, to St. Croix, to serve his remaining time when he took this action.

There are a couple of startling revelations in this 75 minute movie, but nothing on the order of “The Thin Blue Line” and “Making a Murderer,” where we get the suggestion that others might have done the crime.

That’s the Achilles heel of this still-compelling, eye-opening film, a determination to exonerate via coerced confessions without, as Ali himself dismisses, any notion that anybody else committed the murders.

“I’m supposed to be ‘The Fugitive’? Richard Kimble or some s—, looking for the real killers?” Quite right, that’s the state’s job.

But lacking anything like the suggestion of alternative perpetrators, “The Skyjacker’s Tale” is just a lot of self-serving talk from a disarmingly charming man who says he wasn’t given justice, and who escaped the justice he was given.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with photographs of graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Ishmael Muslim Ali, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Michael Ratner

Credits:Written and directed by Jamie Kastner. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:15

Nobody was gung-ho about digging into the Transformers toybox again. Not Michael Bay, not Mark Wahlberg or the few other folks who could be called recurring characters.

So let’s assume everybody got paid, and HOW, to concoct the worst movie of the summer of 2017.

Like “Cars 3,” the picture, “Transformers: The Last Night,” is opening a big, seemingly robust number one — $40 million for the weekend, $65 since Tuesday evening.

Of course, that’s far and away the worst opening for a Transformers movie. So Paramount gets one last bump to the bottom line from the Autobots and actors. They spent $217 to make it, as opposed to the $210 or so that went into “Transformers 4.”

And yet “The Last Knight” has been running in the $50 million range behind the performance of “Transformers 4,” which cleared $100 million on its opening weekend.

Terrible/Awful reviews aren’t helping. But even those review-proof folks showing up seem to know what to expect. I sat next to a kid, his earbuds in, more interested in his phone opening night, part of a whole family of pay-their-money/ignore the movie types.

So Paramount is still able to collect donations from idiots. That goes for the rest of the planet, too. It’s earned over $50 million in China alone,with over $100 million in the international BO kitty by Sunday. So maybe it isn’t “The Last” anything. Got to appease the Chinese.

“Wonder Woman” is still in second place, pushing “Cars 3” down the ladder. Disney/Pixar and Paramount took their shot at wringing more money out of past-peak franchises, but aren’t getting rich off the idea.

The latest and hopefully last “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie has earned $161 million, domestically.

International box office could keep that one alive, possibly even “Transformers,” but that’s not a sure thing. Thankfully.

“All Eyez on Me,” the long-planned Tupac Shakur bio pic, fell off the table its second weekend, an 80% plunge. It will not earn $50 million, when all is said and done.

“Mummy” won’t hit $100 million, domestically. “47 Meters Down” is holding audience, but won’t hit $40. Still a win, for a movie that came out on video first.

“Cars 3” succeeded in killing “Captain Underpants,” which was all it was designed to do — seemingly. “Captain” won’t hit $80, all in.

“The Big Sick,” in just a couple of theaters, is owning the per-screen average, besting “The Beguiled,” which opens wider next weekend, with “Beatriz at Dinner” not quite up to “Book of Henry” limited release numbers.

The symbolic becomes the literal in João Pedro Rodrigues’s “The Ornithologist,” a Biblical allegory set in the wilds of Portugal.

The title character (Paul Hamy) is a man of science, trained to study birds and their behavior.  He has an accident on a remote river, and is “saved” by two dotty Chinese pilgrims (Han Wen, Chan Suan). They’re lost, a long ways from the famed ancient pilgrimage trail that Saint James took to Spain’s Santiago de Compestela.

“Saint James has abandoned us!”

They communicate with the man they’ve pulled from the river and revived in English, the only language they all share in common. And the more they talk, the more irked, or at least alarmed, Fernando (Hamy) becomes.

“We’re cursed! We are surrounded by forest spirits! The Devil is here!”

He’s ungrateful enough to decline to help them find their way back to Spain, and dismissive of their superstitions — Christian and otherwise.

“There’s no such THING as the Devil!”

He shouldn’t be shocked when he wakes up, trussed up in a Chinese web of ropes, their prisoner. Because, apparently, they didn’t bring anything to nail him to a tree with.

Fernando makes his escape, only to start hearing the weird noises the women were complaining of, and then see the primitive pagan rituals of some oddball dress-up cult, or boys’ club.

Rodrigues tests Fernando for what seem like 40 days and 40 nights, just like Jesus.

And then our hero meets Jesus himself — literally, a deaf-mute shepherd leading his flock with a dog and a whistle.

The writer-director of “O Fantasma” and “Two Drifters” tosses in a homosexual make-out session and an encounter with topless female stag hunters, a knife fight and every symbolic bird in the book. Like Terence Malick, he lets the camera share reveries in nature, and the film delights in showing us cranes, eagles and the Great Crested Grebe of Portugal, as well as scenes of its star, Hamy, naked.

Owls float into Fernando’s odyssey, harbingers of death in many cultures. And if the whole Christian allegory isn’t plain enough, an injured white dove makes its way to our pilgrim.

“The Ornithologist” is so stunningly strange and out of its time that this slow and deliberate film holds your attention, making you wonder what wonder or calamity will befall Fernando next, if he will “find his way” to Jesus, as the Chinese hikers speculate, or,  being a man of science, will simply kill God.

But no wagering on that outcome. Just pay attention and make the connections and marvel that decades removed from the allegorical Euro-cinema of the ’60s, Rodrigues has crafted a throwback movie, and found a way to challenge viewers with a superstitious tale over two thousand years old.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Paul Hamy, Han Wen, Chan Suan, Xelo Cagiao
Credits: Written and directed by João Pedro Rodrigues. A Strand release.
Running time: 1:55

There’s trouble on the stand-alone “Han Solo” prequel at Lucasfilms.

As in, cartoon directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “The LEGO Movie”) delivered a film that Lucasfilm isn’t happy with it. The all-important “tone” wasn’t right. Hell, where was that realization when “The Force Awakens” stayed in snooze mode.

Anyway, “Star Wars” veteran and “Big Chill/French Kiss” legend Lawrence Kasdan scripted “Han Solo” and he was having creative differences with the two. Were they going for something lighter? If so, bummer. A little levity would have awakened “Awakens.” I like Lord and Miller.

“Rogue One” is what every “Star Wars” movie should be shooting for, in terms of tone and approach to the universe. Gravitas, doom, with moments of wit and levity.

More Donnie Yen! More Forest Whitaker!

Anyway, Lord and Miller are out, and Ron Howard — pretty far removed from “Rush,” decades past “Apollo 13,” is stepping in. The “safe” choice, sure. And why not?

Among the Big Name directors still showing up on set, Howard’s a solid B+. And we were never going to see a Spielberg, Scorsese et al on board. Favreau would have been a good, safe choice, too.

But Howard and Lucas go waaaaaaaay back, to “American Graffiti,” to “Willow.”  They’re contemporaries, like Kasdan and Lucas. And Howard’s had an ongoing relationship with Lucasfilm, one of those extra sets of eyes George has relied on, over the decades, to get the “Star Wars” jobs done.

Howard will supervise FIVE WEEKS of reshoots and re-editing, “toning” up, as it were. He’ll get the credit if it clicks, and little of the blame if it fails. Win win!

You don’t see the “Baby Driver” practicing his craft, rehearsing for the getaways he’ll have to race through from bank jobs and armored car heists. He doesn’t have a hands-on interest in automobiles, which he can steer the wheels off of — instantly calculating drifts, handbrake-turns and relative rates of acceleration.

So let’s just call him a “driving savant.”

He can remember lengthy, detailed instructions about each caper despite listening to a vast range of music through his omni-present earbuds. Let’s just say he has Eidetic memory, or total recall. And really good focus.

“Baby Driver” doesn’t invite over-thinking. But as visceral, swaggering summer popcorn picture fun, it’s hard to beat. Impossible, as a matter of fact. Forget your comic books and sci-fi sequels. THIS is the movie of the summer.

Writer/director Edgar Wright (“Hot Fuzz,” “Shaun of the Dead”) has cooked up a jaunty, jolting getaway driver movie, perfectly-cast, dazzling in its speed and fraught with violence. It doesn’t greatly alter or improve on other movies of this mini-genre — “Drive,” “The Transporter” and the granddaddy of them all, “The Driver” with Ryan O’Neal (Netlfix it).

But Wright throws three tasty hooks onto that main idea.

The driver, in this case, is a “kid.” Not young, like Ryan Gosling’s “Driver.” He’s called “Baby” by the hood (Kevin Spacey) who summons him for his various jobs.

Baby is a music nut. He collects iPods and loads them with everything from Barry White, and Lionel Richie to Queen, T-Rex and Simon & Garfunkel’s title tune — “Baby Driver.” The music isn’t just to put him in the mood and deliver a soundtrack for bone-rattling car chases through Atlanta. Baby has tinnitus and needs the music to drown out the ringing in his ears.

The reason Baby has tinnitus is a childhood trauma, one that left a few scars on his face, one that — logically — should make him fear cars and reckless driving. And how can hear anything — instructions, what have you, with those earbuds in? Oh. Right. He secretly tape records conversations, but not as “notes,” just to play around with clips of sound in creating beats and jams.

Sure, that’s insane, in that it can get him killed. But again, no over-thinking.

Ansel Elgort, the lanky/gawky and intensely likable kid from “The Fault in Our Stars,” makes an unsurprisingly passive Baby. There’s not a hint of macho about the guy, not a whit of Ryan Gosling testosterone. Baby pulls the car forward to avoid seeing what the robbers he’s chauffeuring around do to that armored car guard, head-bobbing to whatever jam he’s listening to, intentionally oblivious.

It takes all the Buckhead-via-Britain charms of Debora (Lily James of “Cinderella”) and her spot-on Southern waitress drawl to give Elgort’s Baby something no Elgort character has ever enjoyed on the screen — sex appeal.

Master of menace Spacey is a no-brainer casting decision as Doc, the omnipotent employer of hoodlums to pull “jobs” and Baby to help those hoodlums escape.

Jamie Foxx brings an amusing psychosis to Bats, a pathological thief and amoral killer who gives pep talks in the car before leading his team into the bank or whatever.

“They got what’s rightly ours.”

Jon Hamm is more of a surprise, giving a tightly-coiled mania to “Buddy,” drug-loving triggerman who only has eyes for the sexpot gun moll half his age (Eiza Gonzalez) who goes by the moniker “Darling.”

Wright adds Lanny Joon as a dopey Asian robber who confuses “Michael Myers” masks with “Mike Myers” masks, Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers as another tattooed punk-for-hire, and singer-songwriter Paul Williams as an underground gun dealer to the mob.

All of them just seasoning for a lean, mean story about a kid wanting to escape the “blood money” business he’s trapped in, the girl who might join him in that dreamed-of dash west on I-20, and the murderous mob who don’t want to let him go.

The car stunts are almost entirely real, with little of the incessant digital manipulation one gets in such movies post-“Fast and Furious.” Elgort is a shockingly effective lead, and Wright renders the budding romance, his camera swirling around two would-be love-birds, invading their space and pushing them closer together, with disarming charm.

And if the picture turns darker and darker and the finale feels like an overdrawn cop-out, that’s small potatoes. “Baby Driver” delivers its genre story beats with verve, delivering a bracing thrill-ride of popcorn picture and a most-entertaining return-to-form for its writer-director, who scores tons of points for style, if not originality.

The music of “Baby Driver” — hipster cred, or Baby Boomer’s fantasy? 

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and violence.

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza Gonzalez

Credits: Written and directed by Edgar Wright. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:53

I haven’t kept the fact that this summer of sequels is just a-wearing me out. People asking, “What movie are you looking FORWARD to?” And I answer with any title that springs to mind that doesn’t have a number after it, or a colon.

I could tolerate “Pirates of the Caribbean,” because it got back to enough of what the first film had going for it, and promised — briefly — an end to this. But Johnny Depp’s broke, so, well…hell.

“Covenant” and “Transformers” and “Cars” and on and on. Ugh.

So I will be sitting, in all fairness to the film, expecting, nay DEMANDING, that “War for the Planet of the Apes” do something that distinguishes it from its CGI predecessors, AND its 1970s antecedents.

Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, here’s some fun that an Internet wit (Interwag) has cooked up.

I guess, in acting terms, 60 is the new 85.

Because Daniel Day-Lewis, just a couple of months past that milestone birthday, has announced he’s giving up a profession he seemingly mastered.

Acting will join a long list of many other professions, such as butchering (which he learned for “Gangs of New York,” for instance) that DDL took on, mastered and moved on from over the course of an Oscar winning/theater icon career that started when he was but a child of Britain’s academic/intellectual nobility (Dad Cecil DL was poet laureate).

His spokesperson announced the news to Variety.

Another Paul Thomas Anderson (“There Will be Blood”) film will be his last, “Phantom Thread” — a period piece/drama set in the 1950s world of Euro-high fashion. It’s due out at Christmas. So, one more scene in a vintage Italian sports car (“Nine”), one more shot at one more Oscar, and that’s it?

Some people are mocking the decision, or at least paying tribute to his famously thorough reputation for preparation and staying in character all during a shoot, by suggesting that oh, he’s prepping to play an actor who announces his retirement from acting.

The wags.

I’ve interviewed him a few times, and he comes off as a serious man who delightfully refuses to take himself that seriously.

But what else has the man to prove? Like Streep, he commands Oscar-bait roles every time one in the appropriate age-range comes up. He gives, if we are to believe his myth, his all to each and every performance.

So unless the guy wants to Olivier/Hopkins/Kingsley himself with one great bit superhero movie paycheck, or more, why work for work’s sake?

I love Sir Ben, and to a lesser extent Sir Tony. But I can’t see them giving up greasepaint. They just work and work and work.

A lot of people do that, and it’s basically cultural brain-washing. If you’re not bored away from work, drained by the work itself and not really in need of the cash, why pile up more?

So he’s not Hopkins, Jimmy Buffett, Cher, KISS, et al. That’s worth admiring, not ridiculing. Living your life as if the acclaim, the distraction, the attention and the money is “never enough” is nothing to be proud of.

The summer of “ENOUGH already” continues at the cinema with the arrival of the fifth “Transformers” movie. The  cars are upgraded to AMGs, Astons and Lambos, and all those kids you’re tempted to take to it learn how funny using the word “shi-” is, in pretty much any situation.

“The Last Knight” is easily the worst installment in this endlessly awful series, probably the worst movie of the summer (“Cars 3,” you’re OFF the hook), a garbled action-and-edit-packed mess that bastardizes history and legend, defies coherence and proves that Anthony Hopkins will do anything for one last big, bad check.

The “satisfaction” of packing a mini “Big Lebowski” reunion — John Turturro, joined by the robot voices of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi — only makes you remember that Jeff Bridges has too much sense for this, and that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s the lucky one. He died before the temptation to take a payday picture could be floated his way.

Because this is Michael Bay’s “Inferno,” an action hack sentenced to the hell that these enterprises have become, addicted to the money when he might have, one day, redeemed himself with some violent, foul-mouthed buddy picture (“Pain & Gain” was as good as he will ever get).

The prologue makes the Knights of the Round Table a literal fact, embattled Britons “saved” when Arthur’s magician pal Merlin (an unrecognizable, but half-funny Stanley Tucci) summons a metallic dragon to fend off Saxon hordes.

The Transformers, with their XXXXL size, alien tech and willingness to “help,” have always been with us — crashing their ships, fiddling in Earth’s little affairs — like World War I.

Having Mark Wahlberg’s Cade Yeager quote sci-fi icon Arthur C. Clarke — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — may be the funniest thing any of these movies have demanded of him.

Cade is a fugitive, wanted by the Decepticons, hunted by the TRF (Transformer Reaction Fo—oh never mind). He hides out in “alien contamination zones,” defending the Autobots from TRF’s “Kill’em all, let God sort’em out” ethos. That throws him in with the Transformer-loving potty-mouthed 14 year old-gadget guru, Izabella (Isabel Moner).

And being hunted by Josh Duhamel and a bunch of actors whose names nobody can remember eventually runs them from the devastation of New Jersey to the vast junkyard of South Dakota, and on to Jolly Olde Brexitland, where Hopkins plays the last member of an order of knights sworn to keep the Secret History of the Transformers on Earth a secret.

Say what now? I mean, I get the Mongol Hordes reference, but since when were these transforming gadget-bots “secret?”

Laura Haddock inherits the push-up bra role, this time a historian and blood relative of the Order who must help a “chosen one” (Guess who that is?) use a talisman to track down the Staff of Merlin, actually an ancient Autobot weapon.

Optimus Prime goes home (to Cybertron, his planet) and goes rogue, thanks to indoctrination by a villain named Quintessa, as in “The Quintessence of Evil.”

And all the cute robots, including a C3PO knock-off butler-bot voiced by Jim Carter, no longer a butler at “Downton Abbey,” show up, fight and cuss each other out in robot trash talk, as Duhamel and his drone-and-Osprey-equipped TRF team shout “Come ON, let’s GO, ”  hurtling us from Namibia to China, South Dakota to the White Cliffs of Dover.

Three credited screenwriters came up with graceful exposition — “You got my message — You brought everyone here.” — and zippy one-liners.

“It’s OK to be a kid, Lil’ J. Lo.” “A big gun makes a big man.”

Hopkins vamps it up, and utters “Has my life been wasted?”

We’d never thought so, before now.

In all seriousness, this is barely-coherent, not-worth-a-brain-cell-of-analysis garbage. And if there’s a sixth movie in this toys-to-theaters fiasco of a franchise, it’s on your heads.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of sci-fi action, language, and some innuendo
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, Isabella Monerp
Credits: Directed by Michael Bay, written by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan. A Paramount.
Running time: 2:25