The Essentials: The Films Of Michael Bay, A Retrospective

“The Rock” (1996)
Nicolas Cage, you’ve got your Oscar. Welcome to the world of Michael Bay. This slick, high-concept actioner sports a deliciously ripe premise, with Cage as the wonderfully-named Stanley Goodspeed, a chemical weapons specialist who joins a team of special ops dedicated to breaking into Alcatraz to stop a terrorist threat. It’s never that simple, of course, so beginning a tradition of Bay films where an improbable risk is taken by trusting an untrained loose cannon, the team employs John Patrick Mason, the only man to break out of The Rock. As played by Sean Connery, Mason is an aggressively old-school presence, a man’s-man whose attitude clashes heavily with his high-tech collaborators. While Connery and Cage are a compelling duo, the movie makes Goodspeed less of an intellectual and more of an obsessive-compulsive nerd who needs to “man up,” diluting any unpredictability that might emerge from such a loaded setup. And while Ed Harris’ renegade general-turned-villain is initially compelling, like the rest of the largely overlong film, his motivations grow distant in a packed third act that sullies the relatively punchy action spectacle of the first two hours. Still, it’s an entertaining piece of work and arguably Bay’s “best” film. [B]

“Armageddon” (1998)
Sound and fury signifying nothing. At this point, “Armageddon” is less of a movie than a Michael Bay checklist. The story, such as it is, involves deep core drillers employed by NASA to travel into space to annihilate a fast-approaching asteroid, or as one character puts it, “Basically all the worst parts of the Bible.” When asked by star Ben Affleck on the DVD commentary why they simply didn’t train astronauts to drill, Bay famously replied, “Shut up.” The gang-written script spotlights a team led by Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis at his smirkiest) who consist of movie-types, with Owen Wilson as The Cowboy, Steve Buscemi as The Pervert, and Michael Clarke Duncan as The Black One… the characterizations don’t get any deeper from there. To their credit, Bay has never had a more committed cast, and Willis and Billy Bob Thornton, as an exposition machine with a tragic backstory, develop a genuine camaraderie based on hoary Screenwriting 101 cliches. But for every moment that clicks in a dim, crowd-pleasing b-movie manner (Will Patton as the Morose Redneck who Loves His Family), there are two that don’t, usually involving Bay’s trademark slapstick humor — extra credit given to Peter “A Perfect” Stormare, who sets Russian-American relations back decades with his Teutonic Space Madness. Ultimately, “Armageddon” is a victim of its own excess — visually, the film sings when the questionable physics allow for a number of teeth-rattling action sequences. But when the final credits roll, the main emotion tends to be exhaustion or, to anyone who kept their eyes open, a headache. [C-]

“Pearl Harbor” (2001)
“Pearl Harbor” might be the defining film of Michael Bay’s career. For one, it was his attempt at making a more grown-up, “serious” movie (along the lines of “Titanic”) – a three-pronged romance starring Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, and Kate Beckinsale told against the backdrop of the most famous surprise military raid in American history. For another, it would be his most widely derided film, critically, yet, and during a period where he strained for credibility, it certainly hurt him (and informed the bitter “fuck you” attitude of 2003’s in-your-face “Bad Boys II”). It would also prove to be the last movie he would make for Disney (former Disney chief Dick Cook was quoted in a recent GQ oral history of the auteur as saying that the film was “one of the most difficult shoots of modern history”), which had been his home and multimillion dollar playground since 1996’s “The Rock.” Maybe even a slight attempt at readjusting his style to confirm to the movie’s aw-shucks vibe was a miscalculation, or maybe the story was simply too ungainly. There’s evidence that points to the latter, since far more interesting than what was released in theaters was the home video “director’s cut,” which runs only a minute longer than the previous version but reinstates a significant amount of violence into the battle sequences (giving them a more visceral punch) and, most importantly, refocuses the story on the friendship between the Hartnett and Affleck characters and not the soapy love triangle angle that consumed the original cut. It makes it a much more traditional Bay affair, about dudes getting down to some really hairy business, and a more successful one too, but this is certainly still one of his more ungainly and overwrought efforts, that mistakes melodrama for character relations and five-alarm action sequences to fill in the gaps of everything else. [C-]