Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on June 2013

Though about an Army unit based on a plastic toy mythos, this aggressively stupid (we’re talking Transformers here), tension-free fare for 10-year-olds plays more like a superhero movie. A very bad one. Soulless, boring, sloppily edited, overly populated, exposition heavy, and a “plot” that fairly screams out for quotation marks. Names: Channing Tatum, Dwayne Johnson, and a near-comatose Bruce Willis, though don’t blink or you’ll miss the latter. I gotta say though, that the rock-climbing ninja battle is kind of cool if you imagine it as, say, a demented, murderous Cirque du Soleil knife fight.