As a girl-and-her-robot story, Bumblebee is genuinely playful and affecting. Sure, Hailee Steinfeld’s Charlie is a walking cliché, tormented both by memories of her dead dad and by the richer, blonder girls who mock her awkwardness and her relative poverty. But Steinfeld brings real depth to the one-dimensional role, especially once she starts sharing her garage—where she toils to repair her father’s old Corvette, thereby establishing her tomboy bona fides—with the titular transformer. With a canary-yellow paint job and glowing blue eyes, Bumblebee proves to be an agile comic partner, whether he’s grooving to the sounds of The Smiths or inadvertently rampaging through Charlie’s home like the dog from Turner & Hooch. Director Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings) has a good handle on social misfits, and he wields some impressive special effects—in addition to those iridescent baby-blues, Bumblebee has metallic flaps that double as puppy-like ears—to make the robot impressively expressive; the computer code becomes a character, one who conveys anxiety, devotion, and fear. His cold steel will warm your heart.
Unfortunately, Bumblebee is still a Transformers movie, meaning it’s encumbered by the franchise’s attendant baggage: infantile plotting, tedious exposition, dopey humor, and lots of noisy robot-on-robot carnage. It’s possible to envision a director who can make lemonade from this sludgy cocktail of grinding metal and boyhood testosterone (Steven Spielberg is again credited as executive producer), but while Knight shows finesse in the film’s more intimate moments, he proves ill-equipped for the numerous clashes of mechanical behemoths. In general, Bumblebee spends too much time away from Bumblebee (and Charlie), focusing instead on the arrival of a pair of evil transformers (voiced by Angela Bassett and Justin Theroux) who are inexplicably granted access to the government’s secret satellite surveillance program. Such illogic might be forgivable if it were a mere conduit to the requisite bot-battling, but Bumblebee insists on making it a focal point, even shoehorning in a rift between a glowering colonel (John Cena, slyly funny) and a credulous scientist (John Ortiz).
Like I said: It’s a Transformers movie. And once the inevitable, clanking climax rolls around, the film has squandered its sweetness and whimsy in favor of the usual tiresome franchise-building. Perhaps this was predictable, but it still feels like a betrayal. Bumblebee may be an unwitting member of something called the Autobot Resistance, but in surrendering to its toyetic commercial imperatives, Bumblebee’s true ethos is one of capitulation.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.