Michael Bay's New Movie Isn't Just Bad
Of all the things that I never expected to happen with superhero and franchise movies colonizing the multiplex, Michael Bay making movies for Netflix was something I never saw coming.
Bay has long been a punchline for cinephiles for more reasons than I can count. And if you don’t know why people mock and look down on Bay, well, you’re likely not reading this piece.
The odd thing is that it’s very easy to see Bay as having another career, a more interesting career. I mean the man made his name with action movies like Bad Boys and The Rock, and I wasn’t a fan of either film, but it’s easy to think of him as someone who would have gone the way of the late Tony Scott. I mean, Bay isn’t nearly as good Tony Scott was, but one can see the influence of Scott’s work, even though I think Bay missed the point of some of it. Then of course he made Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, which were horrible for many reasons. Bad Boys II had moments. The Island wasn’t very good, but he was at least trying to do something interesting.
Then came Transformers. Bay dedicated himself to the Transformers. I think most toy designers didn’t last as long as Bay did on that franchise. It would be easy to simply mock them as not being very good. They were not. It would be easy to point out that after the first one – which was mediocre – they became barely coherent and exercises in style more than anything.
Well, filmmaking style, military porn, bad jokes, and a little misogyny. I won’t even get into the racism.
Admittedly I’m biased because all I wanted out a Transformers movie were a few good voice actors to get work – which happened – and to watch the transformations. As in, keep the camera still and watch as the robots turn into vehicles and vice versa, at least once. To show that the designers had thought out in detail how the robots would look, how they would work. That’s what I wanted. I didn’t get it.
Bay made three of them, made a lot of money doing so, and by the end it felt as though there were as loud and over the top and pointless as possible. That there was nowhere Bay could go. And so what did he do? He turned around and made the best movie of his career.
Pain & Gain.
I’m not even being mocking. It was a crass, over the top, occasionally tasteless movie but it had style and it had a point and it was funny and none of the actors were sweating over their roles, but it was well done.
Which is why it was so exhausting to see him then go make another Transformers movie.
But then he moved onto making films like 13 Hours, which had slightly more political nuance than the Transformers films.
Then he made an even worse Transformers movie, The Last Knight, which essentially ended the franchise. It was restarted with Bumblebee, which took its cues from nostalgia and Spielberg movies and a sense of wonder and awe instead of…I don’t know, wherever Bay gets his ideas from.
Which brings us to his new movie, 6 Underground.
Not a great title.
Also – and I in part mention this because this is a movie intended to be the first installment of a franchise, what the heck will the sequel be called? 7 Underground? 6 Back Underground? 6 Underground 2?
But I digress…
Bay has always had an anti-government streak to go along with the military jingoism streak. Call it libertarianism. Call it conservative. Call it not wanting to pay taxes? Don Siegel’s movie Dirty Harry was attacked by many as fascist upon its release in 1971, but I don’t think the philosophy in Bay’s movies are coherent enough to qualify as an actual political philosophy. Instead it’s a boys fantasy masquerading as serious critique of what would happen if there were no red tape or bureaucracy.
This also means no checks and balances. No oversight. No democracy. And that people are at the mercy of the whims of dictators and billionaires. But like I said, it’s not a serious political critique at all.
Ryan Reynolds plays an impeccably dressed billionaire (it is a Michael Bay movie. Everyone is either impeccably dressed or undressed) who is “dead” and he recruits a number of other people to join his team of six people (why six? Who cares. It’s never explained) who will save the world.
The opening action sequence in Florence, which lasts roughly 20 minutes, is pure Michael Bay. It’s also far and away the best part of the movie. We meet the characters including Reynolds who plays “1”. Mélanie Laurent is 2, an ex-CIA operative who has been shot and is busy shooting their pursuers while another character is performing surgery to extract the bullet. Dave Franco is driving the car and making a lot of bad jokes. Reynolds has the eye of the guy they just killed and is dangling it over the retinal scanner on his phone. Elsewhere in the city are the final two members of the group, an ex-hitman and a “skywalker” – which human beings might know as parkour runners. But considering the lengthy explanation of the phrase “coup d’etat” later in the film, the filmmakers may have felt that two French phrases in the movie would confuse the target audience.
Now that opening scene is entertaining, but is it worth watching the movie just for that scene? No. Is it a great car chase? No.
But it is entertaining dumb mayhem. Afterwards, though, the plot of the movie starts in earnest. Essentially Bay has made a movie about the Syrian war. There are gas attacks on civilians. There are refugee camps. There’s a popular uprising – with jets shooting into the crowd and a convoy running over protestors.
You see, in the country of Turgistan, there’s a brutal dictator and he has a brother who he keeps under house arrest. The plan is to rescue the brother and state a coup on the Day of the Dead. A holiday that doesn’t seem to mean much of anything and except for being mentioned by the main characters, we don’t see anyone really celebrate. There is a big party on the dictator’s yacht, but that’s the extent of it.
Leaving aside the lack of logic – again, no one watches a Michael Bay movie for plot or coherence – there’s something twisted and disturbing and sick about making a bad action movie about a war happening now. It’s tasteless and disturbing.
Seriously. Who thinks, I want to make a mediocre action movie about six people ending the Syrian war and use the actual suffering of the Syrian people as a backdrop and use the massive casualties and suffering – that is happening today right now as we’re watching this movie – as props.
Because there is a difference in using a pigeon or random passersby and using a massive ongoing humanitarian crisis as props. I don’t think anyone who made this movie understand that. Or even cares.
Michael Bay is Michael Bay, but the truth its that while he’s always had style and I earlier made the comparison to the late Tony Scott, he was never at Scott’s level. I think about the action movies and scenes that have excited me in recent years and none of them were shot by Bay.
The big difference is coherence and this movie has none.
Why introduce six people with descriptions of their jobs, their roles on the team, but then have rarely use those skills. For example just to name something obvious, after their driver gets killed, why don’t they go looking for another driver? If they have an ex-hitman and ex-CIA spook, why do they also need a sniper? Why does the doctor not do anything doctor-y except in the opening scene?
Part of what makes the whole assembling a team story interesting is the ways that their different roles and skills and personalities interact and play a part in this bigger story. Here every character has martial arts and weapons training and it makes no sense why they were chosen.
I think about Mélanie Laurent – who is far better than the movie deserves, and I can only imagine took the job to help fund her other projects like her recent directorial debut. She’s a woman in a Michael Bay movie so she has sex. She has a scene where she’s in her underwear. There’s a flashback scene of when she still worked for the CIA and it’s so beautifully shot, she looks amazing, the lighting and camera work is incredible.
It’s a scene of the CIA taking down a decent man and handing the country over to his brother, a murderous dictator. That scene isn’t a haunting nightmare, no, it’s just a badass scene. It just has to look good. What it means doesn’t matter because it’s only reason for being is to make Laurent – and every other element – look awesome. This is what I mean when I say that there wasn’t much thought out into politics or philosophy in the movie. Or at least, no more thought and consideration than was put into the story.
The movie is mediocre. Which I think most people would have guessed by the trailer, by the description, or simply by the fact that Bay directed it. On one level it’s a very paint by numbers kind of action movie with some Michael Bay style. But honestly, most of the movie was just boring.
When it wasn’t boring, though, the people of Syria deserve better than to be props in a bad Michael Bay movie.
Mélanie Laurent may not wish to be associated with the movie, but she is far and away the best thing about it.