She and Ramos mellow out the movie’s inevitable mechanical vibe they’re good company.

In other words he’s a large, furry pun.Īlongside Ramos’ Noah, Dominique Fishback plays the other significant human character introduced here, an unappreciated but brilliant museum factotum Elena. The Maximal leader is the gorilla-esque leader Optimus Primal. The good-guy Maximals, whose planet was eaten by Unicron, end up in Peru, where they befriend the locals. This one’s a time-traveling movie, kind of, thrown in the wash with fragments of Indiana Jones (referenced by name) a sliver of a “Fast & Furious” headbanger (some nimble digital and practical chase footage) plus a hint of a “King Kong” movie. In “Rise of the Beasts” the Autobots have been stranded on Earth for seven years and seven films. This time Noah’s the one who discovers: that car he just stole? It’s an Autobot, from the planet Cybertron, reporting to noble interstellar warrior Optimus Prime, who’s about to face Earth’s latest nonpolitical calamity: the planet-sucking Unicron. Their mother (Luna Lauren Vélez) works hard to keep the family afloat. Anthony Ramos of “In the Heights” portrays Noah Diaz, an Army vet and electronics expert whose little brother (Dean Scott Vazquez) copes with sickle cell disease.

The new “Transformers” movie clocks in at 117 minutes, a lot of them pretty zippy. You know what’s not bad? “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” Dumber than a box of lug nuts, but superior to the Michael Bay-directed schlocktaculars that ran as long as 165 minutes.

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