'Transformers 5' To Sabotage The Career Of Nickelodeon Star Isabela Moner

I won't say that the Transformers movie series is cursed. It's too successful, too huge, and too popular to carry such a label, even if Transformers: Age of Extinction underperformed at the domestic box office. However, the Transformers movie series does have the nasty habit of chewing up actors and spitting them out and ensuring that nobody takes them seriously for a good long while. Look at Shia LeBeouf, whose time in the series saw him transition from a promising young actor into walking, weeping art project. Look at Megan Fox, who was reduced to a sex object and has had to spend the past few five years reminding us that she's a perfectly fine actress with rock solid chops. Only Mark Wahlberg has weathered this series and that's because he's Mark Wahlberg – nothing embarrasses him anymore.

So the news that the young TV star Isabela Moner is joining the cast of Transformers 5 makes me want to grab her parents by shoulders and give them a good shake while demanding for them to explain why they obviously don't love their child.

The Wrap reports that Paramount is eager to cast Moner in director Michael Bay's latest assembly line of loud noises, crass jokes, and idiotic plot beats that somehow last for more than two and a half hours. They speculate that there may be some corporate synergy in play, as Moner is a mainstay on the Viacom-owned Nickelodeon, which explains why anyone over the age of 18 probably hasn't heard of her. Anyway, her credits include 100 Things to Do Before High School, Dora and Friends: Into the City!, and the upcoming Legends of the Hidden Temple movie.

And she's also 14 years old, so Bay thankfully won't be able to treat her as vacant eye candy like he did with Fox, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Nicola Peltz. Then again, Age of Extinction did feature a deeply uncomfortable and wholly inappropriate subplot about Texas' "Romeo and Juliet" law, so who the hell knows?

The Wrap also has a few details about Moner's role. She'll play...

...Izabella, a street-smart tomboy who grew up an orphan and was raised in foster care. She counts a small Transformer as her only friend... until she meets Wahlberg's heroic inventor Cade Yeager.

Since the only remotely interesting thing about Age of Extinction (other than Stanley Tucci screaming about algorithms) was that the film ended with Optimus Prime flying into space to kill his robot gods, I couldn't care less about the further adventures of Cade Yeager, even if he now has a plucky young orphan by his side.

Transformers 5: More Loud Nosies will open on June 23, 2017. Not even the cinematographer of John Wick can get me interested in this one and there are several more movies in the pipeline.