5. It Totally Wastes Brilliant Actors
Paramount PicturesSquandering an awesome cast is nothing new to the Transformers franchise, what with the likes of John Turturro, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand slumming it for a paycheque in previous installments, and AoE also delivers spectacularly on this front. The most notably brilliant actor in the movie is without question Stanley Tucci, who plays an engineer that ends up helping Wahlberg and co. in their attempts to put a stop to Lockdown's plan. He brings a small amount of self-awareness to a film that is mostly punishingly unaware of its own silliness: he clearly is in on the joke and has a lot of fun hamming it up and no doubt being handsomely paid for it, even if he's so far above material like this. In addition to this, Frasier Crane himself, Kelsey Grammer, plays the part of CIA agent Harold Attinger, though sadly he's reduced to the role of the generic villain and little else. Meanwhile, talented up-and-coming Irish actor Jack Reynor gets little to do beyond play the cliched bad-boy love interest, and hilarious comic actor T.J. Miller is forced to try and make the best of Kruger's irritating one-liners. Simply, just as before, every good actor in this movie is completely wasted: Tucci just about gets a chance to do something interesting and entertaining, but he above all else deserves better material to work with. Hopefully his salary at least paid for a very nice yacht...