It Creeps Up On You Without A Warning

My thoughts on Brooklyn 45 and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

As Ted Geoghegan’s Brooklyn 45 opens, it is a couple of days after Christmas Day, 1945, and Lt. Col. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) has summoned some longtime friends—accused war criminal Major Archie Stanton (Jeremy Holm), buttoned-down Major Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington), top-notch military interrogator Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay) and Marla’s husband (and the only one not to serve in combat) Bob (Ron E. Raines)—to his Brooklyn brownstone, the first that any have heard from him since the recent suicide of his beloved wife, who took her life after being unable to convince anyone of her seemingly paranoid suspicion that her immigrant neighbors were actually Nazi spies. What they don’t realize is that the grief-stricken Hock has brought them together to perform a seance in the hopes of contacting his wife’s spirit and while none of them think that it is a particularly good idea, they agree to take part in order to humor him. In news that will probably not come as too much of a surprise, the seance proves to be successful but when they fail to conclude the ritual properly, the group find themselves locked inside the room and forced to confront both the supernatural occurrence they have just experienced as well as the cold, hard truths about the realities of their military service in increasingly unexpected ways.

In blending together elements of the supernatural thriller, espionage and locked-room mystery genres, Brooklyn 45 is an undeniably ambitious work on Geoghegan’s part, so much so that I wish that the final product ultimately added up to the sum of its parts. The performances from the entire cast (which also includes Kristina Klebe in a role that I will leave for you to discover) are all strong and effective—especially the intense turn from Fessenden, one of our patron saints of offbeat American indie horror filmmaking—and Geoghegan conjures up a few intriguing twists and turns in his screenplay and also conjures up a nice sense of tension and atmosphere throughout. The major problem with the film is that the more straightforward dramatic elements of the story are so intriguing that the supernatural material cannot help but feel kind of extraneous and silly by comparison. Because it doesn’t quite figure out a way to reconcile all of its various elements into a completely cohesive and satisfying whole, I cannot quite recommend Brooklyn 45 but at the same time, it has enough things going for it to make me kind of wish that I liked it a little more than I do.

Whatever problems that Brooklyn 45 may ultimately contain, at least it is trying to do something and its flaws are mostly borne out of ambition than anything else. This is not something that any sane, sentient person will be thinking after watching Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the latest and perhaps most tedious of the long-running series of live-action films based upon the Hasbro toy line. Here is a film so vapid and devoid of anything resembling inventiveness, ingenuity or simple entertainment value that it makes Fast X seem fresh and vital by comparison. Set in 1994, the film features yet another battle between factions of giant alien robots with the fate of the Earth in the balance. This time around, our Autobot heroes, led once again by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), are in pursuit of the Transwarp Key, a totem of unimaginable power left on Earth thousands of years ago that will allow them to return to their faraway home at last. On the other hand, the evil Terrorcons, led by the planet-eating Unicron (Coleman Domingo) and his right-hand bot Scourge (Peter Dinklage), want the Transwarp Key as well so that they can use it to help control or destroy the universe. Caught in the middle of the skirmish are a couple of nominal humans—Noah (Anthony Ramos), a former soldier trying to make money to help his sickly younger brother after being drummed out of the military for not being a team player, and Elena (Dominique Fishback), a museum intern who accidentally discovers half of the all-important Transwarp Key and the location of the other half in Peru. Once they all arrive there, our heroes are joined by a group of Maximals, a band of giant robot animals led by a mechanical gorilla named—I kid you not—Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) and also including a noble eagle portrayed by Michelle Yeoh, who seems to have chosen to walk in the footsteps of Shirley MacLaine by delivering an Oscar-winning performance one year and following it the next with an inexplicable appearance in a dreadful summer sequel (which MacLaine did with the one-two punch of Terms of Endearment and Cannonball Run II).

Those going to see Rise of the Beasts with the hope that it might prove to be as genuinely engaging and entertaining as the previous entry in the series, the 80’s-set Amblin Entertainment homage Bumblebee, will find themselves disabused of that notion pretty quickly. That is perhaps not much of a surprise—as lovely as Bumblebee was, it is clear that it was a fluke—but what is surprising is the way that this film will almost have you yearning nostalgically for the five previous entries in the franchise that were directed by Michael Bay. Those films were bottomlessly awful, of course, but, if nothing else, they were the product of a filmmaker who had a vision—a clunky and crackpot one seemingly inspired by a focus group consisting entirely of especially callow 10-year-old boys, to be sure—and was hellbent on sharing it with the world by every means at his disposal. The films were awful but they certainly stayed with you afterwards, whether you wanted them to or not.

By comparison, this installment, directed by Steve Caple Jr (whose previous film was Creed II) is so tedious and forgettable that it practically evaporates from the screen even as it is unfolding.  The plot is so incoherent as to be almost absurdist—even for a film predicated almost entirely on the concept of watching big robots pound the crap out of each other, the narrative on display here is a desperate grab-bag of dumb jokes, bizarre dramatic inconsistencies and moments of embarrassingly ham-handed fan service. The human characters are mostly nonentities and the robotic ones (including a comic relief Autobot voiced by Pete Davidson that turns out to be just as annoying as it sounds) are less than that. Even just as 127 minutes of eye candy aimed squarely at 10-year-old boys, it comes up woefully short—the big action beats are the usual array of tacky-looking sludge that fails to provide a single memorable image during its entire running time. This is “event” filmmaking at its absolute laziest—little more than a banal exercise in IP service of the sort that makes you further appreciate a genuinely creative bit of franchise filmmaking like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and its willingness to actually entertain audiences instead of treating them like dopes—and even those who have actually liked the previous entries in the franchise will find it hard to muster up even a vague amount of enthusiasm for it.