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ScheduleScheduleCurrently playing

Transformers: The Last Knight(English)

——————————————Wonder Woman

(English)——————————————

The Mummy(English)

——————————————Pirates of the Caribbean:

Dead Men Tell No Tales (English)——————————————

Alien: Convenant (English)

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“Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fi fth fi lm in the hugely popular, criti-cally reviled franchise, is also the most extravagantly brutish and lurid.

The Decepticons — the fey gangsta Mohawk, the goofy bikerish Nitro Zeus — look as if they might be audition-ing for “Suicide Squad 2,” and their leader, Megatron, skulks around with the angriest possible attitude, his face marked by a blood-red splash. The good-guy Autobots come off nearly as wasted: Bumblebee is introduced by getting blasted to pieces, and even the stalwart superhero Optimus Prime has slipped over to the sinister side. He has made a deal with the alien sorceress Quintessa, who looks like a very expensive hanging necklace, to salvage the Autobots’ dessicated home planet, Cybertron, by sucking the life out of earth.

There is, in addition, a medieval backstory that returns us to the days of King Arthur, but even this potentially stodgy premise is staged in a heavy-metal Stonehenge-meets-bloodshed way that puts the dark back in Dark Ages. All of which makes “The Last Knight” the fi rst “Transformers” movie that could actually be character-ized as badass, which isn’t a bad thing. It may, in fact, be better.

So what does a better “Transform-ers” movie look like? There’s still a hurtling slovenliness to it — a sense that overly quick cuts and throwaway lines are taking the place of what, in another movie, would be calmly staged dramatic scenes.

It’s almost as if the series fulfi lls Michael Bay: Instead of knuckling under to the system the way he had to do when he made such relatively austere works of artisanal craft as “Armageddon” and “Bad Boys,” here he can just let his destructo action-junkie freak fl ag fl y.

Yet part of what’s exhausting about the “Transformers” fi lms is that hectic bland wholesomeness — the empty

energy that can give you a seizure of antic tedium. “The Last Knight,” by contrast, has the somewhat sexier fl avor of impending dystopia, and it’s actually, if this can be believed, even more over-the-top than the previ-ous four fi lms. For the fi rst time, the messy hyperactive form and nihilistic crunched-metal content seem to rein-force each other.

Mark Wahlberg has a knack for playing free-fl oating desolation that isn’t alienated enough to get in the way of his ripped-belly bravura. And though the previous “Transformers” fi lm “Age of Extinction” was so bad it was irredeemable, it’s now clear that he has the ability to ground these movies — to stand up to the metal — in a way that the softer, fl akier Shia LaBeouf did not.

Wahlberg’s character, the greasy-longish-haired Texas inventor Cade Yeager, is off the grid, running a sports-car junk yard where he looks after Autobots like Hound (voiced by John Goodman), a stogie-chomping brawler with Neptune’s beard. The rage of the Decepticons lures Cade out of his doldrums, and before long he’s thrown together with Vivi-ane Wembley, an Oxford professor who is surely the fi rst scholar in the university’s history to teach classes in strappy pumps that look like they were purchased during a Kardashian shopping spree.

Viviane is played by Laura Had-

dock, a British actress whose greatest presence thus far has been as Peter Quill’s mother in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” fi lms, but she’s a real fi nd, with a puckish sensual vivac-ity, goldfi sh eyes that stare like laser beams, and an effortless ability to spar. Viviane gets drawn into the fray because she’s the last direct descen-dent of Merlin, and therefore the only one who can connect with the magical staff that’s buried in his coffi n.

Mystical medieval hokum aside, Haddock and Wahlberg generate the kind of hostile sexualized chem-istry that is fast going out of style, and a movie like this one can use every ounce of it. The two bicker and pout through a plot that’s like “The Da Vinci Code” crossed with a “Terminator” sequel on Jolly Rancher candies, and they’re accompanied by Sir Anthony Hopkins, who plays Sir Edmund Burton, an elite astronomer who guides the events, but is really on hand as a kind of aging mascot of the happily unhinged.

The plot of “The Last Knight” turns on the apocalypse, which lends the usual chaotic jumble of events a bit of organizing heft. In the epic climax of a picture like this one, the visuals tend to mean more than the meaning, and here the world-destroying energy on hand takes the form of a corrosive weapon that looks like gigantic fl oat-ing shards of cardboard packing debris. It’s all pleasingly spectacular, and also rather empty — at least, until Optimus Prime returns to his true self, his words spoken by Peter Cullen in a voice of such deep rich square nobility that, coming after nearly two-and-a-half hours of hellbent robot-clanking decadence, he seems a cathartically old-fashioned fi gure. He reminds you that there are moments when this series is capable of making you think that you like it.

The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)

《变形金刚5：最后的骑士》

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Josh Duhamel, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, Jerrod Carmichael Director: Michael Bay

Transformers: The Last Knight

A scene from “Transformers: The Last Knight.” File photos

Mark Wahlberg as Texas inventor Cade Yeager.