One Hit Wonders – Michael Bay

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Is a there a name more synonymous with overblown, big budget schlock than Michael Bay? Contenders such as Renny Harlin or Simon West pale in comparison to the bombastic stylings of Bay, as his explosions seem more important to his movies than any cast member ever could. With grating performances, terrible dialogue, and overwrought melodrama, his movies have come to represent everything that the cinema-going public hates about Hollywood pictures, relying on soulless action and set pieces filled with tedium to get them by. And yet, one movie among his filmography stands as one of the best Action pictures of the 1990’s. What is it that makes this film stand out among the rest of his movies, one of which Critic Peter Travers referred to as “toxic waste”? And is there any hope for “Transformers” this summer, or is it doomed to fail like Bay has destined many of his previous efforts to do?

1) What Put Him on the Map?

In 1995 Michael Bay came on the scene with Bad Boys, his feature debut and a starring vehicle for up and coming stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, both trying to really make it in Hollywood for the first time. The movie looked great (as all of Bay’s films do), but in the screenplay department the movie was fair at best. With Buddy Cop films a dime a dozen, the movie felt tired despite being an “A” production.

Still, the movie was enough of a hit that each participant went on to bigger and better things. For Bay, he would go on to the best thing of his entire career. With 1996’s The Rock, Michael Bay hit the big time and was free to subject us to his penchant for epic disasters for years to come. What was Bay’s biggest coup in this film? Getting Sean Connery to play John Mason, the last acto’s great role, was one of those wonderful matches made in cinema heaven.

A former MI-6 Agent imprisoned by the United States Government for crimes that are classified for the purposes of national security, Mason is recruited to handle a grave crisis situation. Teamed with bookworm FBI Agent Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), the duo must infiltrate Alcatraz Island, which has been taken over by a group of disgruntled Marines lead by Ed Harris’ General Hummel. Making outrageous demands, the Marines plan on decimating San Francisco with chemical weapons unless their ransom is met; that is unless our heroes can stop them in time.

For the solitary time in Michael Bay’s career, the director used all of his skills to the hilt to craft an exciting thriller that still stands up today. All of the usual Bay “bells and whistles” are here, huge set pieces, gun fights, brutal hand to hand combat and flashy cinematography, but for once, they actually help serve the story. Bay also smartly builds this film around Sean Connery, who gets to play a Bond-esque character one more time in his career. John Mason is like Bond with a really hard edge, getting some great uses of vulgarity in as he slits the throats of unsuspecting bad guys. Connery is simply awesome to behold, as a spy worn down by his years of espionage and imprisonment, but still able to get out there and break a few necks.

Harris is also able to bring some weight to the role General Hummel and give an impassioned performance. The man is the epitome of a noble villain, trying to get money for the families of Black Ops soldiers who have died in battle. Also surprisingly good is Cage, who brings a lot of quirk to Goodspeed. The actor is much better here than he usually is in these types of movies, such as Con Air or Gone in 60 Seconds, as Goodspeed seems to be a fully formed character and not just a paper thin Action hero with a funny accent.

The Rock was huge upon its release and its still awesome to watch now. The movie has great energy and is surprisingly adult for a Summer Blockbuster. With big laughs, bigger action, and even just the smallest amount of heart, Michael Bay orchestrates The Rock at times with both precision of a surgeon and the blunt power of a sledge hammer. With his second feature, Bay showed a promise to bring Action movies into the new millennium with skill and ferocity.

2) The Crap They’ve Done Since

Ten years after The Rock, Michael Bay has yet to make another good movie. In fact, the man has directed not one, but two of the worst examples of Hollywood tripe in the last quarter century. First up is 1998’s Armageddon. Wow, what a waste of nearly three hours. The film looks great, has some good actors, and has a budget the size of Texas. So what could possibly be bad about this film? Almost everything that isn’t on the technical side of film making, as the writing, acting and plot are some of the worst examples of this type of movie ever conceived.

As an asteroid races towards Earth, a team of oil drillers lead by Bruce Willis is trained to fly up to the asteroid, insert a nuclear bomb, and destroy it. That is the plot of this epic disaster of an Epic Disaster film. First I’ve got to say, is oil drilling that much more complicated than being an astronaut? Because you would think that it would be mmuch easier to train astronauts to the do the oil drilling, no matter how convincing Bruce Willis as delivering his lines. Secondly, who decided these were the greatest oil drillers in the world? Was there a poll? Did an independent contractor come in to assess the crew and their skills against other oil drillers?

With gigantic action sequences that either don’t make sense or don’t make you care, this film is about explosions and over the top machismo more than anything else. Honestly, this film is “Battlefield Earth bad” with a bigger budget and more cheese. Nothing from beginning to end rings true in any way and at the end you’re left with 150 minutes you’ll never get back.

So to follow up this disaster, what does Bay do for an encore? He sullies the memory of the men who lost their lives at one of the greatest real life tragedies in American history. Pearl Harbor could have been one of the great War movies, with a modern look at the Pearl Harbor attack having the possibility of being one of the most visceral movie experiences ever caught on film.

Instead we get a Titanic rip-off with Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett showing off how much they can’t act as they each vie for the heart of Kate Beckinsale. The whole thing looks like a postcard, but is just as two dimensional. By the time Beckinsale asks where it hurts and Affleck utters “Maybe it’s my heart?” you start rooting for the Japanese to show up sooner. As for the battle scene itself, it’s probably the best PG-13 battle scene ever, but is that really saying much?

With his two biggest offenses out of the way, Bay would go back to the well to make the most bloated Buddy Cop movie of all time. Bad Boys II reunited Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in a two and half hour Action/Comedy that featured some of the most putrid scenes ever devoted to celluloid. The movie has tons of action, but without any emotional attachment to these characters whatsoever, the whole thing comes off like an exercise. By the time that the Miami Police Department invades Cuba and we’ve gotten about 27 “hero shots” in a row, the experience becomes more numbing than exciting.

Breaking away from Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Bay went to Dreamworks and in the summer of 2005 directed one of the yea’s biggest flops. Joining Bay to trip the light craptastic was Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor, who live in a colony that has survived a nuclear holocaust, but thankful brought their X-Box’s and a lifetime supply of Aquafina with them. The movie is like THX-1138 on stupid pills as it goes from quirky Sci-Fi to all out Chase movie with enough gloss to outdo Pine Sol. The two halves really don’t mesh that well and what you’re left with is a movie that becomes a creature without a soul.

3) What You Think They Can Do To Be Successful Again?

Would retiring from directing be too much to ask? At this point, Michael Bay simply needs to make a film that isn’t openly offensive to people’s senses. Perhaps choosing strong screenwriters for his movies would be a good start, as the writing squabbles on Armageddon and Pearl Harbor are famous by now. A movie with real heart and subtlety is probably out of the question for Bay, so perhaps if he tried harder to include interesting characters instead of just archetypes in his films would help immensely. People simply don’t act and talk like real people do in Bay movies, uttering ridiculous dialogue or acting in a way that breaks with all rational thought.

Finally, cutting back on the high intensity assault on people eyes and ears would probably do a world of good. Other directors have made a name out of doing spectacle (Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg), but their names come with a sign of quality that the picture will be exciting and possibly very moving. Bay’s name simply comes with the promise of crashing cars and explosions.

In the end, The Rock may end up being the only tolerable picture that Bay ever does. Everything is simply clicking all the way through for the movie, eliciting an excitement that Bay has yet to reproduce. If Transformers doesn’t perform like it should, expect the directo’s career to simply start to fade away. Explosions may be great, but they’re nothing without heart to go with them.

Robert Sutton feels the most at home when he's watching some movie scumbag getting blown up, punched in the face, or kung fu'd to death, especially in that order. He's a founding writer for the movies section of Insidepulse.com, featured in his weekly column R0BTRAIN's Badass Cinema as well as a frequent reviewer of DVDs and Blu-rays. Also, he's a proud Sony fanboy, loves everything Star Wars and Superman related and hopes to someday be taken seriously by his friends and family.