The first reviews of Transformers: The Last Knight are in, and they’re mostly pretty negative.

Anthony Hopkins joins the cast for the fifth installment of the Transformers franchise, co-starring alongside returning cast members Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Josh Duhamel and John Turturro.

“Watching an actor of Hopkins’ calibre swear at his robo-butler and attempt to wring out laughs by uttering the word ‘dude’ is painful – even for a Transformers movie,” writes a critic from the New York Post.

Directed once again by Michael Bay, the film currently has a terrible 17% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw is especially scathing, writing: “Like so many of Bay’s movies, it is a machine for converting your brain matter into soup.” Empire‘s reviewer is unimpressed, too, saying the film is “bogged down in backstory, lacks a real feel for its characters and still can’t find a way to make its robot-on-robot action exhilarating.”

However, The Daily Telegraph‘s reviewer is more taken with the sequel, awarding it four stars and calling it “a cinematic experience of earth-shattering preposterousness”.

“The movie is shorter than the last one, though, and considerably more bearable,” writes a relatively generous critic from The New York Times.

Transformers: The Last Knight hits UK cinemas this Friday (June 23).

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