Where to begin with Michael Bay

To many critics and cinema connoisseurs in the 1990s through to the 2010s, no director represented all that was crass and ugly about Hollywood more than Michael Bay. At his height, Bay has been a titan at the box office, though his brand of combustible, wreckage-strewn action filmmaking – or Bayhem, as it’s known – and the busy, burnished visual sense that he picked up shooting music videos has only infrequently found him critical favour.

Today, Bay isn’t quite the critical bête noire he once was, his commercial success since eclipsed by the comic book juggernauts. His sugar-rush MTV style is less in vogue at a time when commercial Hollywood now prefers a visual approach closer to that of episodic television. In this climate, some have come to regard Bay anew. To certain critics, Bay is now a premier example of a commercially minded yet critically overlooked contemporary Hollywood filmmaker with strong personal style; in short, he is a ‘vulgar auteur’ – a contentious label, but one which can, nonetheless, literally be applied to Bay.

Bay’s films are deliberately vulgar, with their casual, plentiful violence, and a comedic sense so macabre and puerile it’s almost medieval; and Bay is, whatever the overall quality of his work, unmistakably an auteur, his films carrying a distinct visual signature, and all reflecting the man’s own antic, materialistic, at-times nihilistic view of the world. How much of that you can handle may just depend on how much of a vulgar auteurist you are.

One of two Bay films to have made it into the Criterion Collection, 1996’s The Rock makes for a fine introduction to Bay’s brash, brawny style, as well as a handy primer on his staple characters. Sean Connery’s ex-spook John Mason is The Rock’s macho man of action; Nicolas Cage’s Dr Stanley Goodspeed is the ordinary guy forced in extraordinary circumstances to become a man of action; and Ed Harris’s General Hummel is one of Bay’s insufficiently respected US servicemen, a sympathetic antagonist who leads a squad of disgruntled Marines in garrisoning and installing VX warheads on Alcatraz. Ready to betray them all, meanwhile, are duplicitous, incompetent government officials, who send Mason and Goodspeed into Alcatraz to disarm the weapons before Hummel can fire them on the people of San Francisco.

Visually, The Rock finds Bay restrained, though that’s relative. There’s less of the frenetic framing or bright saturated colours that would characterise Bay’s films later, but the cuts are quick, the camera is perpetually in motion and all that Bay can explode, he does: a Frisco cable car, half of Alcatraz, the foaming mouth of a villain who’s swallowed a deadly pearl of VX. In one scene, Mason and Goodspeed ride a mine car that they inexplicably discover in the bowels beneath Alcatraz, but the whole film feels like it’s on rails, of a particularly satisfying race-against-the-clock ride.

Once The Rock has given you a feel for Bay in high-concept blockbuster mode, you might want to try Bay’s other Criterion-approved picture. No film of the 90s disaster movie revival has more fun with its patently absurd premise than Armageddon (1998), in which a crew of oil rig workers are tasked with drilling into an asteroid and blowing it up before it can reach Earth. The most sincere expression of Bay’s belief in straight-talking salt-of-the-earth Americans over eggheads and authority figures, Armageddon is populist in message and in execution, a wilfully anti-intellectual popcorn spectacular that features a murderer’s row of character actors – Steve Buscemi and Billy Bob Thornton are standouts – playing things firmly tongue-in-cheek.

There’s less heroism (and less unambiguous waving of the US flag) in Pain & Gain (2013), Bay’s black comedy about three knuckleheaded bodybuilders who kidnap and extort a Miami businessman in pursuit of the American dream. Like a Coen brothers film with the cynicism turned up, Pain & Gain finds little to like in any of its characters, chief among them its narcissistic criminal ‘mastermind’ Daniel Lugo (a wonderfully delusional Mark Wahlberg). It still looks like a Bay movie, but nowhere has Bay more knowingly used his style to satirical and downright nasty effect, the heroic framing becoming ironic, and the overall slickness becoming queasy when the ‘action’ involves mutilation and murder.

The promise of America has again soured in Ambulance (2022), Bay’s crime thriller about a desperate veteran (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who attempts to rob an LA bank only to leave it by fleeing through the city in a stolen ambulance. Ever dynamic even on a (relatively) modest budget, Bay introduces into his visual arsenal flying drone shots, which careen at whiplash speed through rooms and down the sides of buildings. Jake Gyllenhaal meanwhile adapts to the Bay style better than arguably any actor has, his outsized turn as domineering heist orchestrator Danny – who Gyllenhaal modelled on Bay himself – like Bayhem encapsulated in a performance.

Apart from a satisfyingly bullet-addled, drag-racing climax, Bay’s buddy cop debut Bad Boys (1995) doesn’t have the resources to deliver much Bayhem – something which its 2003 sequel, Bad Boys II, compensates for manifold. An influence on later action cop parodies, including Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007), Bad Boys II is itself already an inflated self-parody, with crackpot international villains doing unspeakable evil, and Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Miami narcotics dicks Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett promoted by Bay to steroidal, city-wrecking supercops. Opening with Lowrey and Burnett making mincemeat of a Klan rally and closing on the pair driving through (exploding!) Cuban shantytown shacks in a Hummer, Bad Boys II is a lunatic example of modern action cinema, with Bay sending bodies and debris flying in set piece after thundering set piece.

There isn’t much that sci-fi aficionados won’t have already seen in The Island (2005), a dystopian action flick about cloning that echoes everything from Logan’s Run (1976) to Blade Runner (1982), though the film’s images are premium Bay, all dark shadow and magic-hour light. 

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016), meanwhile, is Bay’s Black Hawk Down (2001): don’t expect a nuanced representation of the conflict, region or local people depicted, but you will find viscerally impactful scenes of modern warfare.

Bay has been such a favourite of the Golden Raspberry Awards over the years, he’s currently tied with Renny Harlin for the most nominations for the worst director trophy. Four out of Bay’s five Transformers movies received worst director and worst picture Razzie noms, with only his 2007 original – comfortably Bay’s best, most narratively focused contribution to the franchise – spared the indignity. Bay’s Transformers films received deserved technical Oscar nominations, too, for their spectacular crash-bang blend of live-action and CGI’d elements — but nowhere does Bay’s own assertion that he makes “movies for teenage boys” ring truer than in his films based on the Hasbro toyline.