Bumblebee

(PG) ★★★

Director: Travis Knight.

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz, Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider. 

"Are you staring at my headlights?"

Being the second best Transformers movie is no big deal - there's only one good one (the first one) and four shit ones. Second place is basically a participation medal in this race.

But Bumblebee actually has a crack at being genuinely good, and almost gets there. It fumbles its gear changes, stalls a few times, but manages to get up enough speed by the end to make for a decent-enough ride (that's my quota of car analogies out of the way early).

Central to its success is Steinfeld as teen mechanic Charlie. In between being a film about giant robots trying to beat the transmission fluid out of each other, Bumblebee has the semblance of being a mostly solid coming-of-age story. This provides the majority of the film's charm, and a lot of that is down to Steinfeld's magnetic performance.

We follow her as she struggles with the death of her father, her mother's annoying new partner, a crappy summer job, the lack of a car, and being the scorn of the popular girls. At least one of these problems is solved by using her mechanical skills to get an old Volkswagon Beetle started at the junkyard she frequents, thus scoring herself a free 18th birthday present thanks to the kindly junkyard owner (Len Cariou).

But when the Beetle turns out to be a Transformer who has fled the fighting on his homeworld of Cybertron, Charlie finds herself thrust into the middle of an intergalactic war.

For those of you playing along at home, Bumblebee is a prequel to the five other Transformer films. It's also the first without Michael Bay in the director's chair, and aside from some early moments (and one awkwardly sandwiched one) on Cybertron, it unfolds on a decidedly smaller scale than the rest of the series. There are really only three main Transformers in the plot, and their battles with each other and the army are not of a city-levelling size, unlike the rest of the franchise.

This allows the film to have a more personal scope. Much like the first film, the main driver is the interaction between a human-in-transition and their recently discovered robot buddy, which is very welcome. In Bumblebee, that teen-meets-Transformer plot plays out like the Spielberg masterpiece E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. The '80s setting helps with this vibe, and Steinfeld makes the heart of the story work better than it should a lot of the time.

While it tries its best to feel like it's not a Transformers movie, it regularly does some bad Transformer-ish or Bay-sian things in its plotting that snap you out of the lovely girl-meets-car story that's going on. It's decidedly unsubtle in places, and Cena really grinds the film's gears trying to be the wacky John Turturro-style character, but without the skills to pull it off. It's in these moments, and the cutaways to the bad guys, that the tone of the movie sours.

And despite having a spectacular selection of '80s tunes at its disposal (they get particularly good mileage out of The Smiths), the film leans heavily on its generic OTT score in unnecessary moments rather than embracing its soundtrack of era cuts, which would have helped give the film an extra layer of individual style. A key example is when Charlie first meets Bumblebee - a potentially charming and cool scene becomes mawkish and OTT.

The final battle is surprisingly cool, and plays out better than the generic Transformers climax because it feels personal (and we can actually follow the action). And that's the key to Bumblebee's successes and failures. When it's not being a typical film of the franchise, it feels fresh and enjoyable. But whenever it slips into generic Transformers movie mode, all the good work is undone and the vitality is lost.

Bumblebee is basically a really cool car with a charismatic driver at the wheel you'd like to go for a ride with, but then the car turns into an annoyingly run-of-the-mill robot that's not as interesting.