Then came a huge surprise. Around the time that newcomers TFEVO revealed their take on a Masterpiece-style Hot Rod from The Last Knight, DX9 (in collaboration with Unique Toys, apparently) revealed their own version of the same thing. Initially, the TFEVO version looked superior due to its more intricate transformation and pretty stunning screen-accuracy in both modes, and I preordered it as soon as it became possible to do so... However, when review copies started to circulate, it became clear that the newcomers QC wasn't quite up to the task, and Hot Fire was a nightmare of floppy joints and tiny parts that had to be arranged just so. After I cancelled my preorder, I started to keep an eye on DX9's version in the hopes that it would be closer to Unique Toys' take on movie Lockdown in terms of build quality and mostly-intuitive transformation.
La Hire became available for purchase quite recently, and without much fanfare... Which would often be a bad sign. Throwing caution to the wind, I didn't even wait for more YouTube reviews to arrive before ordering, so lets take a look and see what DX9 have produced.
Packaging:
La Hire comes in a surprisingly small box, more or less on a par with the Hasbro/Takara Tomy Masterpiece Movie series of figures. It also has a similar matte finish with Spot UV applications, though here only on the front artwork - a CG image of the figure in its robot mode, seen from the thighs upward. The design is fairly minimalist, with the robot's name in white at the bottom with, very faintly visible across the top, "ITS SIZE IS * MATCHED WITH THE * MPM SERIES" and barely visible in an outlined font just below, "Kaleidoscope 03". The same information, plus a Chinese script logo and all the usual warnings, are presented on the sides of the box, while the back features a single photo each of the figure in its vehicle and robot modes, along with a brief description of the contents.
Following on from Hasbro's examples, he has a single line of 'bio' at the top of this text, but the rest of it is poorly-translated specifications, including "The door can be opened in the vehicle mode and put the action figure in". It does, however, impart one bit of useful information I wouldn't otherwise have been aware of: "The car spoilers can be adjusted up and down".
Inside, the figure is contained - in vehicle mode - in a plastic clamshell, with two pistols, the Human Alliance-style figure of Vivian Wembley, a small bag containing an ammo clip for one of the guns and a translucent yellow plastic gunflash, along with the instruction leaflet.
Vehicle Mode:
A variation of the Aventador, the Lamborghini Centenario is another gorgeous car, and DX9's representation of it here is excellent. In terms of overall appearance, it supercedes anything I've seen in the Masterpiece Movie line so far simply because virtually the whole car shell is painted - using a super-dark, glittery charcoal paint - where MPM would tend to be bare plastic apart from a few spot applications and tampographs. The only unpainted parts are the windows/windscreens (obviously), the roof and rear bumper (which have a matte finish to the plastic which I can only assume is intentional) and the wing mirrors. The headlights are clear, colourless plastic with a silver undercoat to bring out the detail, while the rear indicators are just painted strips of red on the raised, Y-shaped details. Weirdly, the panels protruding at intervals from the back lack the orange edging of the movie car, but that's something I honestly didn't pick up on until it was commented on in a forum discussion. Just another advantage of not having seen the movie, I guess. The minimal colour detailing on Hot Rod in the movie is all present here, with the strip of vibrant orange running from side to side along the lower rim of the car shell, via the front bumper and providing a nice contrast against the dark colour of the bodywork.
On the sides and at the back of the car, most of the transformation seams are either so minimal they're barely noticeable, or placed in such a way that they blend well with the sculpted panel lines of the car, so it really helps that the car's designer broke the Centenario up onto so many angular panels. The bonnet is less fortunate and, much like Unique Toys' Lockdown-analogue, features an excess of seams in between the myriad sculpted panel lines. It feels as though, given time, this toy's designer could have figured out a better way to break up the bonnet... but, to be honest, the character's CGI wouldn't have made that easy. The only part where the illusion is really obviously broken is on the corners of the rear bumper, just behind the rear wheels, where the car shell is awkwardly cut away to accommodate a die-cast transformation joint featuring a spring. Even this wouldn't have been too bad had it been painted to match the car shell, but the metal is bare and incongruously bright.
The front windscreen has been handled quite strangely, in that both the windscreen and its frame have been molded in dark, smokily-translucent plastic, with deep seams indicating the extent of the windscreen and black paint applied at the front, where the wipers are, while the frame remains unpainted, including the lack of the movie car's orange stripes over the side windows. It works well enough, since the plastic is so dark, you really have to go looking for any light seeping through, but the difference in the properties of the plastic is very apparent between the sparkly painted bonnet, the unpainted windscreen frame and the matte plastic roof. It's not as bad as Peru Kill's weird shrunken windscreen-within-the-windscreen, but it does look decidedly odd.
Easily beating any recent Masterpiece in terms of overall feel and apparent quality, the tyres are separate rubber parts on the silver-painted wheels, and the disc brakes - visible through the spokes - are also fully painted. All that's missing, really, is the paintwork for the wing mirrors... I'd thought that Peru Kill came with spare stickers for his wing mirrors, and that they'd fit here, but I was sadly mistaken.
Taking a leaf out of the Human Alliance books, La Hire's doors open, albeit a little awkwardly and unnaturally, to accommodate a tiny action figure on either one of the fold-away seats inside the cockpit. It's a little difficult to fit her in, despite her being unnaturally small in proportion to the car, and Hot Rod's head is just sitting, quite brazenly, upside down, with the hands just in front of them between the seats. There's no dashboard detail, as such, but the generous eye may interpret the robot's shoulder detail in that way.
Unlike the Human Alliance figures, the robot's weapons aren't integrated into the robot itself or able to transform into anything innocuous, nor is there any way to attach either gun to the vehicle mode as far as I can see. The underside may feature a few gaps, but none are large enough to accommodate one of his hefty handguns, let alone both of them.
Robot Mode:
I've still only seen a handful of scenes of The Last Knight - enough to know that I'd hate the whole thing, but not enough to really get a feel for what the robots look like in action... Then again, some of the videos I've watched on YouTube have had titles like "All [character] scenes from The Last Knight", so it's likely that I'd be none the wiser if I did watch the whole movie.
In any case, the end result of transforming the gorgeous Centenario is stunning. Movie Hot Rod's design took the old G1 favourite of having the car's bonnet as the robot's chest and the doors as 'wings', but - like most of the movie Autobot designs, to be fair - embellished and enhanced the idea, turning a sleek sportscar into an efficient and believable bipedal robot. While much of the surface detail is made up of large panels of sculpted detail rather than the myriad small interlocking parts it represents, this just makes for a more coherent and solid-looking robot - moreso than Peru Kill, to be honest, whose upper body is rather more obviously cheated and made up of larger panels. What's particularly good about movie Hot Rod's design is that it's very G1-referential - car bonnet chest, door wings - but far less clunky. Like the CGI, La Hire is designed to be viewed from any angle and doesn't feature the sort of backpack shortcuts that even the Masterpiece Movie line has used.
Sculpted detail abounds just about everywhere, from the three 'feathers' and embedded gears on each shoulder, through the pipes and pistons on the waist and the intricate panels at the groin. The bulky shoulder armour is largely quite smooth and rounded, but each features a curved silver wheel, venting on the front, and there's even some detail on the inner part, where the actualy shoulder/arm joints are. The biceps and forearms each feature plenty of mechanical detailing, though it's all quite shallow compared to that on the torso, with the details of forearm highlighted with gunmetal and silver paint applications. The legs are seemingly more heavily armoured than any other part of movie Hot Rod, since they seem to feature mainly larger, interlocking panels rather than internal mechanical detail.
Vehicle mode's orange highlights carry on into robot mode, and seem rather more prevalent as well - with applications on the shoulders, forearms, hands, waist, hips, and more extensive applications on the shins and feet. The colour matching between the orange plastic and paintwork isn't great, but I suspect that's because the orange paint has been applied directly to the dark plastic, without any kind of undercoat. Frankly, it's no worse than some of colour matching I've seen on Hasbro or even Takara Tomy's output, and it's not really noticeable at a glance. There's a certain amount of feathering on some parts - notably the curved orange pieces at his waist but, for the most part, it's really well done throughout.
Unlike the Deluxe class Hot Rod figure released by Hasbro, La Hire comes packaged with both of movie Hot Rod's handguns, the standard pistol and the weapon which can, supposedly "stop ze tahm". Curiously, both are essentially the same gun, but one has an additional attachment over the back of the weapon, just in front of the grip, featuring the ring of seven... things... that somehow allow it to create a bubble of temporal distortion, while the included ammo clip can be plugged into a socket on the bottom of the lower protrusion of the other. The sculpted detail is functional and fairly rudimentary, but there's no mistaking what these accessories are. There's also a single plastic, plug-in muzzle flash which fits in either gun barrel, though it ends rather abruptly at the muzzle end. A second would have been nice, so he could be posed with both guns blazing, but it's a nice little accessory on its own. The guns can be attached to either hand via a slot in the bottom of the grips and a small tab on the inside of the three joined fingers, which can then wrap around the grip fairly effectively, with the index finger bent slightly less to give the illusion of a trigger, since there isn't one actually sculpted on the guns. Neither gun has any paintwork, but the ring of pods on one seems to be molded in a slightly different (colour of?) plastic, and features a dot of cyan paint on the front of each pod. They're decent enough, and don't suffer from the gappiness of Hasbro's usual handguns so I'm not too fussed about the lack of paint... the only real downside to these guns is there's nowhere to holster them.
The head sculpt appears to be far more detailed than the TFEVO version, whose dome appeared to be mostly featureless aside from the badge on the forehead. Even the part I'd taken to be a visor features small ridges and details that weren't easily apparent in the movie clips I've seen. The face is as ugly and as squashed-looking as ever but, unlike the Hasbro figure, the orange paint on the face is split into three distinct sections - the 'nose' vent, and the two triangular armour panels on his jaw - which is not strictly accurate to the CGI, on which there were orange panels bridging the space between them. The underlying face, including the jaw itself, is left unpainted, where it could really have used a coat of the gunmetal paint used on his belly, and the orange on his 'ears' is similarly absent. However, the eyes are highlighted with a ring of cyan paint, which is reasonably accurate to the CGI, and there's even hints of his orange 'eyelashes', though that paint application is so thin, it's barely visible except when viewing him up close.
Vivian Wembley figure:
Honestly, whoever came up with that character's name really could have done better... It comes across as one of those situations where the writer was struggling for a surname, and wanted something unmistakeably 'British' and just happened to see something in the news about the famous football stadium. Even the name 'Vivian' makes me think of the classic British comedy show The Young Ones more than anything else... However, that's a criticism of the movie, not the toy...
What we have here is a loosely Human Alliance-style figure, only with more rudimentary articulation (legs, arms and knees can bend forward and back, but there's no rotation at any of the joints and they can't raise outward) and only shoulder height to a genuine HA partner figure. I'm pretty sure that the character in the movie never wore a short-sleeved catsuit with high heels, but perhaps that's from one of the scenes that hasn't yet made it onto YouTube. There are details around the upper chest/neck that suggest openings from some sort of dress, but then the 'hair' almost blends into the shoulders, making it more like a hood, and the bust is... unlikely, to say the least.
The only paintwork on the figure is the skin tone used for the arms and face so, while there's a fair bit of detail sculpted onto the face, she ends up looking like an unfinished mannequin... and the stiff arms with sculpted steering wheel grip don't help with that impression. The latter is a strange choice considering La Hire doesn't have a steering wheel but then, to be honest, I find this figure doesn't fit well inside him anyway. If I remember correctly, the grip is actually intended for an accessory made available to early preorders only... but that kind of makes me wonder why they included the figure at all. Getting her to sit straight on his seats is almost impossible and, despite the range of her hip and knee joints being pretty good, the optimal configuration of her leg joints has eluded me so far. Overall, she looks more like Megan Fox's character, Mikaela, from the first couple of movies, than Laura Haddock's unlikely love interest for Mark Wahlberg from The Last Knight.
Scale is a huge problem as well - the Lamborghini Centenario isn't a very tall car - the whole point of it is that it's low to the road, to emphasise the driver's sensation of speed - but this figure is barely a centimetre taller, and so skinny she looks like a child compared to La Hire in vehicle mode.
There are a surprising number of similarities or parallels between La Hire and Peru Kill, despite the many differences in the resultant robot. Of the two, though, I'd have to say that La Hire is more complicated as it has a greater number of smaller moving parts. It's nowhere near as fiddly as TFEVO's Hot Fire seemed to be, and the build quality of this figure is substantially better than the copies of Hot Fire reviewed on YouTube. There are a number of points on which the instructions are ambiguous at best, so it's worth checking out the video reviews just for clarity but, once you've transformed it a couple of times, it becomes pretty intuitive and, unlike Alien Attack's Firage - and even Peru Kill at certain points - the toy doesn't actively fight against being transformed and is easy enough to get back into vehicle mode with all the parts lined up nicely. It's not without frustrations - the rear wheel panels on the lower legs only rotate one way, the thigh panels are on an awkward, ball-jointed arm which also only seems to work one way - but it's a remarkably well-planned figure overall. Everything below the waist is rather more complicated than the upper half, with the legs/rear wings basically exploding, twisting in several different directions, and coming back together in one form or the other, while much of the top half is a case of getting car panels to concertina into the robot's torso. What's really surprising about it, though, is that La Hire and Peru Kill are almost exactly the same size in vehicle mode, but the latter absolutely dwarfs the former in robot mode... which makes sense (as far as that's possible with anything in the Bay movies) considering the bounty hunter seemed to tower over Optimus Prime in Age of Extinction. I'll also say that Hasbro/Takara Tomy's designers really need to take note of the way the windscreens, roof and rear of the car are handled here - collapsing neatly inside the upper body, rather than hanging off his back. The result may appear a little gappy from the side, but I'll take that over a huge backpack shell any day.
Even given the complexity of the figure, I'm still surprised by how well articulated it is and how easily it holds a pose. Hasbro's output improved considerably in recent years, as they slowly began to fully understand that transforming action figures were a viable possibility, and what most fans now expected from the toyline. It's probably never going to get to the point that either Hasbro's or Takara Tomy's output really rivals the Third Parties, but that's largely because Third Party figures are intended to be made in shorter runs, and appear as more of an event - movie figures, such as this, probably more than any others. La Hire's head is on a double hinge allowing him to look straight up and quite a way down (limited only by his chest), which is then mounted on a base that can rotate freely a full 360°. Rather than settling for little more than the range of articulation required for transformation, his shoulders have pretty much unrestricted 360° rotation, about 90° lift out to the sides, bicep swivel, double-jointed elbows, 90° tilt at the wrist to supplement 360° rotation of the hand... and then the hands themselves are possibly the best I've seen on a recent Third Party figure: the thumbs are ball-jointed with a single hinge knuckle, while the separate index finger is hinged in three places. The remaining three fingers on each hand are joined, but also hinged in three places. Short of those separate kit hands which feature ball joints along all separate fingers, I can't think of a better way of handling them... and I suspect these provide better grip. The shoulder transformation joint can be used to swing his arms back slightly, but doesn't seem intended to do so. I've noticed La Hire doesn't really like to let his arms hang straight down, and that's due to a peg protruding from each side of the windscreen, inside his torso, but swinging the arms back slightly seems to clear this due to an indentation in the armpit. The waist offers 360° rotation and a small amount of (slightly floppier than I'd anticipated) ab-crunch, while the legs offer the sort of range we're used to these days, with the hips restricted at the front by his groin plate, but free to lift 90° backward and not far off that out to the sides, with the upper thigh swivel moving his large thigh spike out of the way of his torso. The knees bend well over 90° (possibly as much as about 130°) and there's an additional swivel joint below the knee. The only downside is that the ankles only tilt from side to side, and the movement of the toe section is fairly restricted. Even so, he's probably one of the most expressive figures I currently own. The only thing he doesn't seem to do well is kneeling - like many TransFormers figures, his thighs are shorter than his shins, and can't raise quite enough - but the photo on the back of the box shows there are ways to accomplish even that.
I had to think long and hard about picking up this figure, as my finances aren't completely stable right now, but I didn't want to miss out or risk paying a ridiculous mark-up on the secondary market. He's cheaper than Hot Fire would have been, clearly better planned and manufactured to vastly higher standards. Die-cast metal has been used for certain key structural parts that might otherwise be prone to breaking. While it takes a similar tack to Peru Kill in using the underside of vehicle shell as robot shell, it's not as extensive here since most of the shell ends up inside the robot's torso. The bottom line here is that La Hire is leagues ahead of anything that might appear in the Studio Series line and barely looks like the same robot as the underachieving Deluxe class toy from The Last Knight's toyline. Pitched as a Masterpiece-analogue, it ends up far cleaner than either of the Masterpiece Movie figures I currently own (looking forward to seeing how it compares with MPM-09 Jazz) without any particularly significant tradeoff in articulation, and the accessories - with the exception of the mini human figure - are spot on. This is probably my favourite movie figure so far, and quite possibly the best Third Party figure currently in my collection - well worth a look if you're a fan of the movie designs, and Hot Rod in particular.
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