By Jackie Shannon
PAIN & GAIN (2013)
Widely touted as Michael Bay’s “small film”, the viciously funny, aggressively confrontational, and loopily over-directed Pain & Gain proves one thing beyond any shadow of a doubt: the infamously bullish director couldn’t make a small movie if he tried. Sure, Pain & Gain might have cost a paltry-by-his-standards $24 million, but this hyper-stylised black comedy looks like it was made for five times that. A sordid true tale about a trio of moronic bodybuilders (Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie, Dwayne Johnson) who diversify into kidnap and murder, Pain & Gain is uncompromising in its goriness and unrelenting in the blackness of its humour, and shows that one of Hollywood’s most justifiably hated-on blockbuster boys actually has a little grunt under his slick, CGI hood.
THE ROCK (1996)
Filled with stupid plot twists (a conspiracy that goes back to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy…really?) and riddled with ham-fisted dialogue, The Rock is also by far the most enjoyable and least stupidly adorned of Michael Bay’s straight-up action flicks. Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery are an engaging mismatched buddy duo, making the most of their nerdy chemist and hardened convict roles, respectively, while Ed Harris swallows the scenery whole as the villain of the piece: a renegade general threatening to launch a nerve gas attack from the charming surrounds of the Alcatraz prison site into San Francisco. Brassy, entertaining, and fun, The Rock was made by Bay when he was still on nodding terms with the word, “restraint.”
ARMAGEDDON (1998)
As a meteor heads straight for Earth, a gang of rough-neck miners learn the astronaut trade so they can rocket up to said meteor and blow it to pieces. To invoke a popular question often lobbed at this absurdist epic, wouldn’t it have just been easier to school experienced astronauts in the ways of explosives, and then get them to do the necessary blowing up? That’s just one of the many goofs in this ridiculously over-the-top but frequently entertaining slab of sci-fi, which boasts far more wit than the usual Bay offering, perhaps due to the scripting input of J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). It also offers three likeable leads in the lovely Liv Tyler (whose dad, Steven Tyler, provides the brilliant super-rock-ballad theme song, “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing”, with his band, Aerosmith), the stoic Ben Affleck, and the hilariously grizzled Bruce Willis, whose final-frames act of sacrifice sees a rare – SPOILER ALERT – on-screen death for the narcissistic action icon.
13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016)
Another highly touted “small film” from Michael Bay, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi sees the director heading into territory that he would be wise to avoid in future. With all of the political subtlety of Donald Trump, Bay should be advised against making films set in or about The Middle East, an arena that consistently makes stumbling wrecks out of even the world’s best minds. The director, however, seems amusingly aware of this in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi, which tells the true story of six American contractor bodyguards caught up in a deadly 2012 siege following the death of Muammar Gaddafi and the fall of the Libyan regime. Perhaps cognizant of the fact that the political ramifications, motivations, and driving forces of the events would be too much for him to bite off, chew, and swallow, Bay instead just plays it like a hi-tech version of an old school western, providing his Libyan bad guys with about as much depth and nuance as Hollywood used to give to its on-screen Native Americans. Still, it’s an exciting tale, and Bay grinds enough tension out of the situation to place 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi towards the top of this list.
PEARL HARBOR (2001)
Michael Bay’s molestation of the traditional wartime epic is an horrendous stain on a tragic historical event, but it’s also kind of entertaining, in a highly embarrassing way…and it even featured on the cover of FilmInk! The director’s obvious belief in and commitment to his mawkish mish-mash of Norman Rockwell and John Ford is almost stunning to behold, like watching a toddler labour over a crayon drawing for hours. With money to burn, Bay unquestionably creates action set pieces of stunning grandiosity, and when the Japanese warplanes start to torch the US military’s mighty Hawaiian base of WW2 operations, it’s hard not to get swept up in the moment. But everything else about this big, silly movie – which avoids the facts of the true life event to instead focus on the dreary, fictional, saccharine-sweet story of two fly-boys (Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett) in love with the same woman (Kate Beckinsale) – just fails to detonate.
BAD BOYS (1995)
This brash, highly energised buddy cop flick sucks for two big reasons: it made big screen stars out of both Michael Bay (who made his debut here after creating music videos for Vanilla Ice, Lionel Ritchie, Richard Marx, Donny Osmond, and Meatloaf) and the insufferable Martin Lawrence. A “hip” 1990s take on the all-too-familiar swag of tropes established by far superior mismatched buddy cop films like Lethal Weapon and Tango & Cash, Bad Boys benefits from Will Smith’s easy presence as a stylish cop, but comedian, Martin Lawrence (who would go on to perpetrate further cinematic crimes against humanity with efforts like Big Momma’s House, Black Knight, and Wild Hogs), undoes all of his co-star’s good work. Though on paper seemingly just a garden variety cop actioner, Michael Bay’s dead hand of excess, and Lawrence’s dead hand of, well, everything, make Bad Boys a very bad film indeed.
BAD BOYS II (2003)
Bad Boys is 119 minutes long. Bad Boys II runs for a whopping 147 minutes, which, in purely mathematical terms, makes it considerably worse than its predecessor. And be careful, folks: Bad Boys III is most likely on its way…
THE ISLAND (2005)
Initially feeling like something different for the action-obsessed Michael Bay, The Island begins as a sophisticated-seeming sci-fi thriller, but soon devolves into a high-octane smash-fest chase, as two innocents (Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, both of whom are uncharacteristically, well, crap) flee from a cloning facility where they were being “harvested” for their organs for use by their wealthy counterparts in the outside world. Silly and unwieldy, the film’s plot is also highly derivative, brazenly copping everything from Logan’s Run and Brave New World, to less obvious antecedents like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Westworld, AI, Minority Report, The Matrix…the list goes on and on. Though pulling back on his action-oriented impulses (“You’ll be proud of me,” he told FilmInk on the film’s set. “There’s only one little explosion in this movie. Seriously…”), Bay can’t help himself in The Island, throwing in car chases and set pieces that are painfully odds with the film’s pretentious grab at a more cerebral brand of sci-fi. Most sinfully, The Island is a lumpen bore, and by the time of its final plot twists, it has become nothing short of a big, horribly expensive joke.
THE TRANSFORMERS SERIES (2007-2014)
Is it a cop-out to group Bay’s Transformers movies into one shuddering, shambolic, robotic bundle, instead of laddering them individually? We’ll happily eat that fair and justified criticism, but honestly, the Transformers series is so profoundly awful that it’s impossible to split its entries up. The presence of Mark Wahlberg, for instance, certainly helps Transformers: Age Of Extinction, but everything else that happens in the film throws a wet, soppy blanket over his undeniably impressive star wattage. Is the first film the most venal because it kicked off this whole automotive movie virus? Or should Transformers: Dark Of The Moon receive the biggest kicking because it made fools of legends like John Malkovich and Frances McDormand? We honestly can’t split them (how can you discern the best and worst elements of a migraine headache?), so we’ll just have to concede defeat. Mr. Michael Bay, you got us…
