I was thinking which director's filmography I should go through next and at first I thought I'd take some other master of the art out of the best of the best. But then I thought it's not good to just focus on the brilliant directors as watching a masterpiece after a masterpiece tends to raise the bar too high for everyone else. So that's why I decided to take a look at Michael Bay. The man who is associated with explosive hyper active action, racist type casting without any character development and idolizing Americana. Not forgetting helicopters flying slow motion in the sunset, the light streaks and flares to spice up dull conversations or the camera that just doesn't stand still for a second. I must say I have a hate/love relationship towards the man. At best he does properly funny action movies which are very entertaining, but at the same time he has no idea how to tell a good story or build drama or characters for that matter. Even the action has been bad in his later films where it's just a CGI mess with no sense of what's going on. But I must say they are still fun, intentionally or not. His commercial and music video background shines through his movies, and that's what they basically are, a mix of commercial product placement and music video. So for what ever it's worth here's Michael Bay's filmography.
Bad Boys (1995)His first movie actually already has everything he became famous for. There's the sunset, the low flying helicopter, no character development, product placement, light streaks and big explosions. The story is simple crap and surprisingly even Bay himself has said that he didn't like the script. But that's not the point in this movie, it's the action and the comedy. Which it has plenty of both. The chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is quite great and they actually put up a buddy act that's one of the better ones I've ever seen. And that's the real driving force of this movie, without it this would be just another crappy B-action flick. Speaking about the action, it's nice to see that at start Bay didn't have his hyper active shooting style and the action actually makes sense on screen. So yes the action worked quite well also. What didn't work in addition to the thin story was the character development. Or the lack of it, there is absolutely none. Luckily the characters are so strong to begin with that you really don't need it that much, but that did leave the characters way too one dimentional to bring any drama into the action. The main duo is certainly great and Joe Pantoliano and Tcheky Karyo were quite ok as well. But the damsel in distress, Tea Leoni, was completely useless, her role was basically to look good. It's actually hilarious in the end where she's inserted in all those slow motion shots where the two cops walk with their guns drawn. Just what's her purpose there? Well that gave me laughs, even though I guess it wasn't intended that way. Despite it's quite serious flaws, it's still an entertaining and especially fun action movie. So it does what it's supposed to do even though it doesn't give you anything extra.
66%
The Rock (1996)Say what you will but this is one of the best action movies ever made. Having said that, this movie is also the movie where Bay first introduced his frantic editing style with most of the shots not more than 2 seconds long and rarely visiting the same angle twice. Something I've later started to hate from the bottom of my heart. But for some reason this is one of the very few movies where it actually doesn't matter at all. This movie is just tons of fun. The overly cheesy patriotism of USA turns into comedy and supports the movie as an extra comic punch very nicely. And believe it or not I really like the story behind all the explosions. I don't mean the story of a lab rat and an old fart fighting a team of highly trained marines, that's pure comedy, but the driving force behind the characters. The bad guy is actually a good guy with a noble cause but with bad means for it, the old Brittish agent wrongfully imprisoned for most of his life and even the lab rat were all genuinely interesting characters. Something you can rarely say in a movie like this. The casting is one of the best of it's kind, Ed Harris, Sean Connery, David Morse and even Nicolas Cage back in the days when he at least still tried to put some effort into acting. Add to those the old legends like John Spencer and Philip Baker Hall and of course my favourite hero actor from the 80's, Michael Biehn, and you have a stellar casting. Another thing that I absolutely love about this movie is the soundtrack, Hans Zimmer's best by far and one of the best I've ever heard. Pure brilliance every note of it. The movie has some idiotic moments that are not saved even by the comedy, but to tell you the truth I can't remember them even though I've seen this movie about 10 times already. That's saying something about the entertainment values. And even though this movie kind of populised the highly annoying fast cutting in action movies, I still can't stop liking this movie, it just works.
98%
Armageddon (1998)So after making one of the best action movies of the 90's, Bay decided to make a movie about rednecks saving the world. I could write a novel on how hideously horrible this movie is, but to be honest it stinks so much that I don't want to waste my time and energy on it too much. First of all the whole concept of the movie that astronauts, some of the world's smartest and most technically trained men, couldn't drill one god damn hole in the ground is just silly beyond belief. But no, rednecks are the guys who can drill anything, drilling holes is an art after all, so they rather send them in space. The rednecks are of course stereotypes with no depth at all to them, you have your over protective father, reckless hero type, a cowboy, a divorced father with a gambling problem, a sex addict, a dumb fatso who lives with his mother and a big black man right from the days of slavery. It actually made me angry how insulting this movie is towards people, if Bay's world would be the world we live in, then please just let the asteroid wipe us all out. And it's just not the rednecks and the racism towards black people and rednecks themselves, the Russian cosmonaut was just as appalling. It says a lot about the movie that Billy Bob Thornton, a great actor but quite characterized as a redneck, is cast as the director of NASA. Fuck yeh! Ok, so the characters are horrible and even though there are some good actors in this most of the cast is horrible as well. Though at most parts I blame the script and the direction, not the cast. Of course Ben Affleck is hopeless no matter what, but for example I have never seen Steve Buscemi giving out a worse performance. He's a fucking character actor, usually playing himself, so that has to be an achievement. And when I say the script is bad I mean it stinks so bad it makes dog shit smell like roses. Just one example, the pilot pulls a gun on Harry and Chick says "What are you doing with a gun in space?". Nothing wrong with that except that they have freaking miniguns on their spacebuggythingies. Oops, guess they forgot... Well it's just one example out of hundreds, but as I said I'm not going to waste more time on this shit. It's one of the worst movies I've ever seen and actually now seeing it for the second time it borders on being brilliant as it really is so bad that it becomes funny. But I'm not going to give it that honour just yet. Though one thing I must still mention, for some weird reason this movie is in
The Criterion Collection, a collection of historically important movies from around the world.
The Rock (1996) is in there also from Michael Bay and that I can understand why as it really is one of the best action movies, but why this movie is in there I have no idea. Maybe those people at Criterion have a very twisted sense of humour or something.
1%
Pearl Harbor (2001)Ok, this movie is supposed to be some kind of a big homage to the soldiers of the war and the people involved with it. I saw an overly long cheesy piece of crap that does nothing even remotely like that. It's just about the same as if Bay would have taken a dump on the entombed U.S.S. Arizona. The thing is that the only sympathetic characters in this movie are the Japanese, now I must say I was surprised that they weren't depicted as monsters and for that I have to give it some credit. But really everyone else seems to be one dimentional obnoxious idiots. Anyway, the movie starts off with a quick buddy establishment, we are given glimpses of the past to make us belive that Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett are good friends. Well I kind of missed that part which should bind them together, at a later point it didn't matter much as they are supposed to be mad at eachother, but then they are supposed to be buddies again and it just doesn't work. The buddy bit just a small problem compared to the "romance" that is what I would imagine a 12 year old girl might write in her diary. And we have to endure this torture for the next hour or so. I can see that they are trying to go for the 40's romantic movies with that, but really why would someone even try to do that? The modern audience expects a bit more depth to the romance than they did back then. The concept of a romance hasn't changed one bit since then, but the way people buy it surely has, so I just have to wonder what the hell were they thinking with this horse shit. So then the bombs start to fall and all hell breaks lose. Luckily the sound effects were loud enough so people who fell asleep in the first hour and a half should wake up by now. But what we get is not a dramatic recreation of the attack, there's certainly no drama in it, hell there's no feeling at all. It's nothing but an explosive war masturbation by Bay. I can imagine him getting all excited like a little kid about all the shit he can blow up while making it look as "cool" as he can. What's "cool" about an attack that killed more than 3000 people? Well unfortunately after the overly long action sequence the movie isn't over and we have to endure an hour more of this utter garbage. There of course needs to be a payback from the attack so the movie can end with an up note, not that there was any tragedy in the attack in this movie in the first place, but lets just imagine there would have been for good sport. Well the two "buddies" are supposed to bind together again, but again I missed it. Was it after they beat eachother up and woke up in the car? Was it while they were killing the Japanese in the air? Was it when they got recruited for the secret mission? Or was it when Doolittle asked them if everything was ok? I mean come on, the viewer has already lost every bit of interest to these characters at this point so why even bother going further. Well they bomb some Japanese factory, Hartnett gets killed, Affleck gets the girl and USA kicks ass, woo-fucking-hoo. They conviniently "forgot" to mention the real reason why Japan surrendered, the two a-bombs. But then again as that would make the audience see how the mighty US of A answered a sucker punch with quite an inhumane act of monstrosity and you can't have that in a movie about heroes. Saddest thing of it all is that the total amount of money spent on production and promotion of this movie roughly equaled the amount of damage caused in the actual attack. They would have made a better homage by spending that money on the veterans themselves and some new history books for the schools.
2%
Bad Boys II (2003)Bay takes another swing at the Bad Boys and of course the budget is now a lot bigger so there's tons more of everything. After the last two monstrosities this movie actually feels like a breath of fresh air and seeing it right after
Pearl Harbor (2001) it feels like a masterpiece. But it's certainly not a masterpiece, it's just an ok action flick. So how does it compare to the first part? Surprisingly well actually. The chemistry between Will Smith and Martin Lawrence is still there, even though it not as funny as it was in the first part. They are clearly trying too hard at parts and it goes a bit overboard, but they still have their moments and give out plenty of laughs. The story was still crap, but maybe a tad better than the first part. Not like anyone would have expected a realistic take on things anyways so it doesn't matter that much. I didn't like the main villain, played by Jordi Molla, he was lacking charisma needed for the part and thus it was kind of a miss. Rest of the cast is quite ok with some familiar faces from the first part. Even though it can't top the first part in the buddy act, the action in this one is so over the top that it's crazy. There's three huge car chases all well worth mentioning. The first one with the car transport truck is quite great with all of it's carnage. The second one is brilliant in it's macabre dark comedy with all the bodies flying around. But the third one is just insane with the Hummer crashing into everything in it's path. Total destruction and that's what I liked about this. Michael Bay likes to blow shit up and call me crazy but I enjoy watching that money burn. So this is a good sequel and even better than the first part, but still it's lacking in too many other departments except action, so it's nowhere near as good as
The Rock (1996). The saddest thing is that after this movie the big budget R-rated movies pretty much died. Well they didn't die, but only a very few were made since. Which is a shame of course.
69%
The Island (2005)After the explosive violent and surprisingly brutal fun ride Bay went back to the more easy going action. This is a story about a man and a woman who find out they are clones, made only to act as spare parts for the people who ordered them. The company which breeds the clones assures the public that the clones are vegetables without any feelings, but yet they must raise them as "normal" humans because of some nonsense about the parts not working if the person is kept sedated. The two clones escape and set on a mission to uncover the whole business of cloning people for medical purposes. I actually liked the story quite a bit, the moral dilemma of taking "spare parts" from a copy of yourself to extend your own life. Also the vanity of mankind that a woman would buy a copy of herself to give birth to a baby so she could keep her form. But that whole cloning dilemma isn't really a new idea and actually it was ripped straight from
The Clonus Horror (1979). Now this movie is actually better than
The Clonus Horror (1979), but as this movie doesn't mention any connection to it, it's basically the same as a stealing the idea which kind of watered it down. Anyway into the nice idea there's inserted this absolutely ridiculous action adventure plot that is just too silly to keep the interest up. Sure there's tons of action and explosions, it's Michael Bay after all, but I really got just bored watching it as there was no feeling to it. Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson try to do their best with the crappy dialog they are given and do a fairly ok job regarding the script. Rest of the cast were quite disposable. The ultra fast editing gets very boring and the movie looks like a Michael Bay movie looks, tons of light streaks, overly saturated contrasty imagery and the camera doesn't stay put for long. Quite a waste of time and money.
23%
Transformers (2007)I loved Transformers as a kid in the 80's. I had pretty much all of the toys and the cartoon show was the high point of the week. Then of course I grew up and got other interests so Transformers was left behind. Even though I knew I wouldn't be the target group of this movie anymore, I still wanted to see it. My expectations for it were very low, mostly because of Michael Bay. And surely enough it wasn't a good movie, but much to my surprise it wasn't a bad one either. This is a movie I would have loved to death when I was 10, it has everything I loved in movies back then. But now as it takes a bit more than explosive action to get my attention I saw a bit too many things I didn't like. First of all this movie is racist. I mean if a guy like me who is whiter than white from a country like Finland can see that, then there really has to be something wrong with it. All the black people in this movie are portrayed as one dimentional stereotypes who are there just for entertainment values for the white folk so they can feel better about themselves. Even the robot, Jazz, that's clearly another black stereotype is the only one to be killed. Only black person who doesn't seem to be type cast is the soldier with the credit card, though his character's biggest moment is screaming "left cheek!" over and over again after which he disappears. Not exactly a world image you want to give to your children. That being said I still liked Bernie Mac as the used car salesman, he was simply hilarious. And in general the comedy in the movie was actually quite good. John Turturro's character was also hilarious and he did a great job with the part. Shia LaBeouf was also a nice surprise and pulled off the hero role quite well. Which can't be said about Megan Fox, sure she looks great but can't act at all. Also Jon Voight was quite bland, though the dialog given to the character wasn't helping the part one bit. Then the main thing, the robots. Well I think they looked somewhat ok. I mean I would have hoped for a bit cleaner versions of them, now they just had too much going on in details that it was hard to make sense of them. But that being said they did look a lot more realistic than the smooth cartoon or toy versions. The reason why I would have hoped for a bit cleaner versions is that they are never really introduced apart from Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. Now they just tend to blend in with each other and it makes it sometimes hard to tell them apart. And that's where one of the major problems of the movie lies, the way the action is shot. It's just one big CGI mess. There's tons of stuff going on and it's shot with a hyper active shooting style, that results in a total chaos which makes absolutely no sense at all. Sure the kids might like it, but the thing is when you have no idea who hits who and where, you really lose interest and just watch the fireworks without any idea of what you are supposed to see. And what's up with the Autobots, am I the only one who thinks everyone else but Optimus Prime were completely useless? Sure they shoot, do flips and set up a show, but mostly they just got their asses kicked while Optimus was the only one who managed to actually kill the Decepticons. This movie also features one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen, right up there with Jar Jar Binks, that little robot that just doesn't seem to die. So there are huge problems with the movie, but still I didn't get bored and had some fun with it. It even managed to raise the little kid in me as I almost cheered when we see Optimus Prime for the first time. But unfortunately in the end it's still a bad movie with some quite good moments.
42%
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)Didn't see this one when it came out, but decided to watch it now as I'm going through Michael Bay's filmography. Being a sequel to a big action movie it of course tries to top it by being even bigger. There's more robots, more army, more action, more explosions, more goofy characters, more product placement and more "Bayhem". And of course the robots are bigger, the army has bigger weapons, the explosions are bigger and the goofy characters of course are a bigger nuisance. But the movie just doesn't go bigger, it also goes smaller with tons of smaller little robot critters which are there to show how diverse their race is or some other nonsense like that. Just as I had declared that little robot in the first one as one of the most annoying characters in the history of movies, this one goes better. There's actually 3 robots that all are way more annoying than the one in the first part. There's the "twins", two robots that make you want to go and get a can of gasoline so you can burn yourself from the misery of watching them. And for fucks sake they even have goofy teeth, one with a golden tooth for that matter, what the hell does a robot do with teeth anyways? That little toy car robot is no better, even worse actually, but luckily it spends quite a bit of time in a box so we don't have to watch it. Apart from those the new robots seemed quite ok, even that old fart Jetfire who was also idiotically stereotyped, but at least he didn't make me want to go on a killing frenzy. But as before it really doesn't matter much how good the new robots were as you don't really see them, only glimpses of them spinning around while fighting. So the annoying CGI mess action continues right where it left on the first part and is actually even worse on this one. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on when shit blew up and CGI mess was spinning on the screen. I'm not a young kid with ADHD so I can't keep up with this lightning cutting pace. Then again if it was a bit slower and smoother it would bring out all the mistakes and inconsistencies of the action, so I kind of understand why they use it. But instead of covering up the mistakes, maybe they could have just properly planned them and shot them in a way that they would look good. That's Michael Bay's worst problem (well in addition of being a racist and sexist and all the other stuff), he just can't direct action. I actually watched the extras of the blu-ray i rented and there was a big segment on this huge explosion that made the Guiness book of records as the biggest explosion ever shot with live actors next to it. In the movie it's nothing special, you've watched non stop effect assault for the last 30 minutes with a hideous fast pace cutting. So when this big bang comes it looks like a nice breath of some easy action, not spectacular or huge or anything like that, only that it's nice that we actually get to watch a shot more than 2 seconds. On the extras however it looks absolutely brilliant, but in the movie it's simply lost in the "Bayhem". Not going to go into the story, it's what it is, not like you could write anything about the meaning of life in a movie about transforming robots so lets leave it to what it is, entertainment. The cast is the same and those who were good on the first one are good here as well and Megan Fox didn't learn how to act in the two years in between so nothing has changed. I must mention the huge amount of mistakes there are in the movie. It clearly was rushed to get finished as you see the cameraman's shadow on multiple occasions and that one slow motion explosion where Megan Fox goes transparent is just something hideous. Also many of the effect shots are very poor. For example when the Devastator is digging up the machine from the pyramid, the falling "stones" look like something I could do better on my own computer. I would love to bash this movie to the ground for the horrible piece of garbage it is with all of it's product placements and formulaic exploitative nature. But I still found it to be somewhat entertaining, however a good movie it surely isn't.
30%
After watching all of the Bay movies again I must say I'm more on the hate side, despite him making one of the best action movies of the 90's and two fairly good action flicks. The thing is that the shit he has also poured out smells so bad it tarnishes the glory of those few good ones. Well anyway that's something to think about when
Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) comes out. I'm not going to see it in the theatre as I'm planning on keeping my promise of not watching any sequel/prequel/comicbook/cartoon/toy/remake/etc. movies in the theatre this year.
