Crosshairs

Crosshairs is the Autobot who does not want to be there. Introduced in Age of Extinction (2014) and voiced by John DiMaggio with a hard-edged sneer, he is a paratrooper in a long green trench coat, alt mode a Chevrolet Corvette C7 Stingray, and his running position across two films is that Optimus Prime is a liability and somebody else should be in charge.

That makes him useful. The Bay films' Autobots are mostly interchangeable, and Crosshairs is one of the few given a consistent attitude: he has survived the Cemetery Wind purge by hiding, he thinks the war is lost, and he says so out loud in front of Optimus repeatedly. Hound calls him on it, Optimus mostly ignores it, and the films use the friction to give their ensemble scenes some texture they otherwise lack.

He is also the most heavily armed Autobot in the later films, dual-wielding submachine guns and carrying a parachute-pack gimmick that the design leans on hard. His action work in Age of Extinction's Hong Kong sequence and The Last Knight's Stonehenge finale is competent and largely anonymous.

What the character never gets is an arc. He starts insubordinate and ends insubordinate, and the promotion the films occasionally hint at, that he might take command if Optimus falls, never arrives. He is a well-defined attitude attached to a very good design, which is more than most of the film Autobots manage and less than the character was set up for.

Chevrolet Corvette C7 Stingray alt mode; dual-wields submachine guns and is the most heavily armed of the later film Autobots. His parachute-pack allows controlled descent and aerial insertion, the paratrooper conceit the design is built around. Limits: no flight, no special durability, and consistently outmatched by Lockdown, Infernocus and the film-scale threats; his effectiveness is volume of fire rather than skill.

• Optimus Prime: a commander he does not respect and follows anyway, the most consistent friction in the later film Autobot ensemble.
• Hound: the belligerent veteran who repeatedly tells him to stop complaining.
• Drift: an opposition of temperaments, discipline against cynicism, which the films gesture at without developing.
• Bumblebee: nominally under Bumblebee's command during Optimus's absences, which he resents.

G1's Crosshairs, a Targetmaster sniper introduced in 1986, is an entirely different character with no continuity link. IDW's Crosshairs is a paranoid Autobot intelligence operative, again unrelated. The film character shares only a name with both.

Survives Age of Extinction and The Last Knight. He does not appear in the rebooted continuity beginning with Bumblebee.

• Voiced by John DiMaggio, best known as Bender in Futurama and Jake in Adventure Time, and a frequent Transformers voice actor across several continuities.
• The name comes from G1's Crosshairs, a 1986 Targetmaster, with no relationship beyond the name; the G1 character was a sniper rather than a paratrooper.
• The trench-coat design was one of the more distinctive silhouettes Industrial Light and Magic produced for the film Autobots, built around a functioning parachute-pack.
• Age of Extinction replaced almost the entire surviving Autobot roster from the first three films, with Crosshairs, Drift and Hound introduced as a new ensemble.
• He appears in both Age of Extinction and The Last Knight but is absent from Bumblebee (2018), which reset the continuity.