Michael Bay – Memphis Flyer

Ah yes, we meet again, Michael Bay, my old nemesis. My Nemesis Prime, you might say. That’s what hero truck-bot Optimus Prime changes his name to when he turns evil in Bay’s latest bit of deviltry, The Last Knight. …

*sigh*

Okay look, y’all. I gotta be honest. My heart’s not really in this. I know, I love writing a good Michael Bay takedown as much as you like reading them — probably more, if I’m being honest. I’ve been doing them for years. Back in the day, Chris Herrington, the Flyer‘s former film editor, would assign me to do the Michael Bay movies, because he knew I hated them. I’ve had a Michael Bay-sized chip on my shoulder since 1998’s Armageddon. How do you mess up a movie about heroic astronauts trying to save the earth from an asteroid? There were so many ways. Then there was Pearl Harbor. How do you mess that up? This is the film where Ben Affleck gets on a train to go from New York to London, neither of which is anywhere NEAR Pearl Harbor.

I include that tidbit in every Michael Bay review, because I still haven’t gotten over it.

And now, another Transformers movie. The fifth one. Giant Robots Go to England. At least they don’t take a train.

I don’t think Michael Bay’s heart is in it any more, either. Back when he had Will Smith and Martin Lawrence demolishing Haitian neighborhoods in Bad Boys 2, at least he seemed like he was having fun with it. In the nonsensical opening scene — in which it is revealed that the secret to King Arthur’s success turns out to be, you guessed it, Transformers — Merlin (Stanley Tucci) takes a big swig of whiskey before staggering into a crashed alien spaceship to forge an alliance with a giant robot. It has the feeling of a confessional moment for Bay: Oh boy. Here we go again. …

Heavy metal — as in considerably cumbersome CGI depictions of giant robots turning into other things.

Bay’s been watching Game of Thrones and obviously missing the point. You like flawed characters caught in impossible situations making hard choices? How about a bored looking Markey Mark just kind of floating through the frame while animated piles of scrap metal scrape together in the background? To say Mark Wahlberg is phoning it in overstates his engagement. Wahlberg is leaving a voicemail for the audience. He was hoping you wouldn’t pick up.

As a longtime Bay watcher, he’s always been indifferent to the audience’s suffering, but in last year’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, I detected something new: a seething resentment of the audience. The Transformers Reaction Force, a special forces group led by Santos (Santiago Cabrera), who can’t seem to decide what side he’s on, seems imported from that movie. It’s like Bay’s sneering misogyny, evident in his treatment of Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), the Oxford English Lit professor who can’t seem to speak in complete sentences, has been extended to the entire world. Our alleged hero Cade speaks in Trumpian word salad, insulting any and everyone he comes into contact with. For Bay, there’s only one use for words: busting chops. Expressing dominance.

There’s a general shoddiness to the whole endeavor. A Goonies-like group of kids is introduced early, only to just wander off without explanation. Bay has always had a knack for explaining things that didn’t need explaining and not explaining big things like, “Where did those five kids go? Did they die in the robot apocalypse along with the tens of millions others alluded to but never seen?” The same stock footage of fighter planes peeling off to attack is used over and over again in the final battle, which itself is inexplicably ripped off from last year’s epic flop Independence Day: Resurgence.

“It’s just big, dumb fun!” might be a valid defense against my half-hearted critical barbs, except for one thing: No one is having any fun, least of all Michael Bay. It’s not even fun to hate-watch Transformers: The Last Knight. At this point, even writing this review feels like enabling bad behavior. As a three-headed robot dragon swoops in, breathing fire, King Arthur screams, “This is what the end looks like!” And I can only say I hope so.

During the interminable screening of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, I had a lot of time to contemplate the phenomenon of Michael Bay. Since the director’s 1995 debut Bad Boys launched Will Smith’s acting career and earned $141 million on a $19 million budget, his films have consistently been hugely profitable. The third and fourth films in his Transformers series grossed more than $1 billion each.

Yet, Bay is, by any other measure, a terrible director. Not just bad — Ed Wood bad. He can compose a slick image, but he seems either completely indifferent or actively hostile to logic, continuity, and empathy. This is a man who, in Pearl Harbor, had Ben Affleck get on a train to travel from New York to London.

Manscaping and McDonald’s product placement in 13 Hours

As I watched the 16th or so identical sequence of identical white guys machine-gunning undifferentiated brown Libyans, I achieved insight into the Great Bay Conundrum: He’s a commercial director. Not a director of commercial films, but actual advertisements stretched out to feature length. So who better to direct 13 Hours, a film about the September 11, 2012 riot/attack on American outposts in Benghazi, Libya, that left ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others dead? Since the incidents happened in the middle of President Obama’s reelection campaign, the Fox News commentariat made it a cause célèbre, alleging conspiracy on the part of Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to cover up … something. They’re never clear on quite what, even after a witch hunt that has gone on for three years.

13 Hours is a typical Bay disaster, full of what would be called rookie mistakes had they been made by anyone else. Instead of telling the story of the battle through the eyes of one soldier—excuse me, security contractor—he takes on six, all of whom are muscle-bound, self-described “alphas” sporting identical, meticulously groomed beards. I took eight pages of notes trying to make sense of who’s who, but to no avail. So when a few of these identical-looking guys die or are gravely wounded, there’s no emotional connection. Bay seems to be vaguely aware that’s a problem, so he periodically stops the action to let them Skype with their six identical-looking families back home. One of the wives tells her husband she’s pregnant while in the midst of a McDonald’s product placement scene. For Bay, sympathy is just another form of branding.

Despite the excess of protagonists, there is no clear antagonist, just masses of “tangos” swarming the walls of civilization, which makes 13 Hours more like a zombie movie than a war movie. Bay wants to make sure you get that, so someone exclaims “I feel like I’m in a fucking horror movie!”

The real bad guys, of course, are liberals, represented by that most left-wing of figures, a CIA agent (David Costabile), who speaks in an NPR voice. Ambassador Stevens (Matt Letscher) is portrayed as a grandstanding jerk who won’t listen to the wisdom of our bearded, gun-freak heroes, until he dies a martyr to the Romney campaign.

Bay’s contribution to the steady moral decay of the American hero is putting “security contractors” — meathead mercenaries who reminisce about the good old days in Iraq — at the center of his film and expecting us to react to them like they were uniformed soldiers. Jack Silva (John Krasinski) laments that he keeps getting sent by his leaders to foreign lands to “die in a battle he can’t understand in a place he doesn’t care about.” Well, too bad. He’s a mercenary killing for money, not a soldier fighting for his country. If he doesn’t like it, he can just get another job — and indeed, in the end, he quits to become an insurance adjuster.

There’s nothing wrong with making a political film, even one whose screenplay was apparently written by a Commercial Appeal commenter, but at least American Sniper was a skillfully executed piece of right-wing agitprop. 13 Hours is a mostly boring, occasionally infuriating attack ad targeting Hillary Clinton. It’s Bay the ad man, getting back to his roots.