From Transformers: The Last Knight, it’s Mohawk, the character who got the Suicide Squad-like intro and got his head lopped off. How’s this little figure translate to core class? Read on and find out.
Funny little dude, picked him up at Target today, had them price-match Amazon’s $9.99. I have no real attachment to TLK and I barely remember the character, but the design was fun enough and the toy seemed like a funny little stabby fellow.
Robot mode is charming enough, some splashes of paint and the bronze mouth paint really stand out. He can move pretty well thanks to some ball joints, but I would have liked to have seen the wheels fold down as shoulderpads more to match his look. His bowie knife is alright, it and his removable head seem destined to end up lost in a lot of collections. The faux knees trip me up a lot in posing, I keep thinking he’d look better if they moved instead of the lower ones. He has virtually no heels so he is easy to miss his center of gravity in a lot of poses and fall down, there’s not much forward movement in his ankle joint so the knees have to keep them under him, though the ankles do have enough tilt to work with. The removable head is a cute idea and works pretty well, they tied it down on the card quite well, thankfully. He does have some hollowness, I don’t even mind the back that much but the thighs
Transformation is odd, there’s a sense that this is what Legacy Prime-universe Arcee was trying to do but more clumsily from having more joints, it retracts the shoulders but then it just doesn’t do anything with the arms worth note, and doesn’t retract the hips when it should. The front end and midsection tab together for stability while the rear end holds together tightly for no real reason.
Vehicle mode isn’t great or terrible, it is in a weird in-between world of “alrightish?” that slides around there depending on how forgiving you feel about some stuff. The thighs are too high and wide for the front end of the bike but get the idea of that unique design across and end in the saddle and cafe fender. The arms end up just blocks hanging off the sides, they’re not part of the bike’s design in any way and only one of them is needed to hold the rear end together, they’re not as well integrated as the knife tabbed to the side, which says something; they also flare out which widens the bike right after the shoulders retracted trying to narrow it, so they only look good in 2D space from the side. I do appreciate that they painted the grips, brake calipers, headlights and a few more little details, gives him a little something since the rest of his deco ends up locked away in bot mode.
One thing I really don’t like is the gappy look of the right side, the left has half of a fake engine block but the right doesn’t have this so it’s just wide open, I don’t even have a problem with Mohawk’s head peeking out since it’s so oddball that it doesn’t really look like a robot head, it’s just that there’s nothing ahead of that. My fan transformation is simply jamming his forearm into the gap, it doesn’t affect the knife at all. My other nitpick is that the wheels aren’t thick enough, they’re sizable on the real bike in the film and don’t carry as much presence on the toy, but that’s a design issue.
Overall, I’ll call him a floating “B”, plus or minus half a point depending on which side of a few things matter to you about Transformers.
