This begins with a bit of a prequel backstory, and gets off to a decent start thanks mostly to John Cena (as Agent Burns) who in the backstory set in the 80s was a special forces soldier on a training exercise when he sees Bumblebee landing on Earth, shortly followed by a couple of Decepticons.
But it goes a bit downhill when John Cena takes a back seat after the opening scenes, and the new lead cast member emerges as Hailee Steinfeld (playing Charlie Watson). Steinfeld was also a major supporting cast member in The Marvels (2023) which was a terribly ill-conceived and uncoordinated tomboy-power flop so that doesn’t stack up well for this movie.
When it gets going, this movie turns out to be like a cross between Transformers and Herbie, as Bumblebee takes the form of a yellow beetle car and the lead characters drive around in it, talking to it/him, experiencing various stunts, and getting him to help out with all kinds of tasks.
I would have liked to have seen John Cena take a more sustained role in this movie, and it would have been nice to get some additional good cast members involved too. Imagine if Cena had as much screen time as Jorge Lendeborg Jr (playing Memo, Charlie’s aspiring boyfriend). It could have been way more awesome but I guess that’s just not the genre this movie was going for – they wanted it childish and emo. For this reason I’m going to rate it Below Average, on a par with Transformers 3, thus declaring it joint weakest of all Transformers movies to date.
Sequel
Bumblebee (2018) was the sixth Transformers movie, and there’s been one more since – that’s Transformers 7: Rise Of The Beasts (2023). It comes with an entirely new cast of humans (yet again), plus the usual squad of Transformers, and a whole load of new ones too (the Beasts).