Why does a robot need to disguise itself as a giant metal rhinoceros? There are probably better questions to ask of Transformers sequel Rise of the Beasts, but for some reason this is the one that lingers. This long-running franchise, based on the popular range of action figures, has always willingly embraced the absurd. It has been required to: Transformers as we know it was created by combining two unrelated ranges of Japanese transforming robot and wrapping a cartoon narrative around them. The characters do not transform for logical reasons; they transform because in 1984 that made for a cool toy.

For this seventh live-action instalment, it goes for broke by introducing the Maximals: transforming robots that disguise themselves not as cars, trucks, and fighter jets, but as wild animals. That worked in 1996 to launch a then-ground-breaking CGI cartoon and accompanying toy line. I am not sure it works in 2023 in live-action cinema. A robot disguised as a Porsche looks like a Porsche. It turns out a robot disguised as a rhinoceros just looks like a rhinoceros-shaped robot, and the writers of Rise of the Beasts don’t seem too interested in working out why that would be a desired appearance to have. I am sure this was not the intention of Paramount Pictures or director Steven Caple Jr but seeing a line-up of robots standing nobly in the wreckage of the climax, and one of them is a rhinoceros, is simply the most absurdly funny thing.

Michael Bay’s widely derided sequence of Transformers films aimed for a teen audience: not so inappropriate that you couldn’t show them to an intelligent nine-year-old, and not so juvenile that a grown adult wouldn’t enjoy themselves. This approach worked very well the first time around too, with the visual effects mayhem serving to frame a straight-forward story about a teenager’s first car. Indeed it worked so well that the only other decent live-action Transformers film, Travis Knight’s Bumblebee, gender-swapped that story and re-told it on a wholesale basis. Caple’s take feels much more directly aimed at an audience of children: it kicks off with a giant robot fight, presents more simplistic versions of its lead characters, and is much more interesting in keeping its pace moving and visuals colourful than in grounded storytelling or even vague attempts at realism.

When the climax arrives, it is at an alien beacon atop an active volcano. There are no anonymous civilians in peril or urban settings, as usually appears during this kind of scene, and it is only once they are gone that one realises how necessary they were. The sense of scale evaporates, and it becomes apparent that once everything on screen has been rendered in CGI Caple’s cartoon-like escapade has literally become a cartoon.

Rise of the Beasts succeeds in pulling away from Michael Bay’s worst tendencies – including a prurient male gaze and blind casual racism – but at the same time it fails to add any fresh enthusiasm. It ignores its own absurdity. Despite featuring a villain the size of the planet, it lacks any sort of epic sensibility. It plays it safe, and while that does make it watchable it doesn’t make it good.