Transformers Age Risking Extinction: Death By One-Liner

When production for this movie was first announced, sources from sites like Badass Digest and Screen Rant hinted that it would take a more serious tone. Much of the childish humor would be excluded from Transformers:Age of Extinction along with many of the memorable characters like Sam Witwicky (played by Shia LaBeouf), Mikaela Banes (played by Megan Fox) and Agent Simmons (played by John Turturro).

Half of that promise was kept--most of the original characters, humans and robots alike, were completely wiped from the big screen. Replacing them were a cash-starved inventor named Cade Yeager (played by Mark Wahlberg), his teen daughter Tessa Yeager (played by Nicola Peltz), a couple of new Autobots (Hound, Drift and Crosshair played by John Goodman, Ken Watanabe and John DiMaggio, respectively) and a slew of other characters. However, the movie was nowhere as serious as the pre-release reviews made it out to be.
As a matter of fact, it was more of a cheesy action flick than a serious action film thanks to the underdeveloped character plot (which I will expand on in other posts) and the abuse of a certain movie element--the one liner.

I have nothing against the use of one-liners. Many memorable characters, like the terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) from James Cameron's The Terminator and the Black Knight (played by John Cleese) from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, are memorable because of certain one-liners that have stuck with movie-goers throughout the ages (Remember "I'll be back". What about "It's just a flesh wound"?). However, the one-liner should be used in "moderate" amounts like many other things in life. Transformers certainly oversteps that boundary of moderation.

Let me emphasize that it is difficult to quantify when a movie is getting too much or too little of something. When it comes to one-liners, some movies can afford to place two or more one-liners for every interaction between two characters. Other movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction, cannot afford to litter a script with comebacks and comments on the obvious, because these movies have so much ground to cover in terms of character development and advances in plot. All that these set of one-liners do for movies like Transformers: Age of Extinction is make certain roles redundant. Any movie-goer can tell you that redundancy is a dagger in the heart of any respectable film franchise.