Bayhood: 6 UNDERGROUND

Michael Bay’s 6 Underground gives him the opportunity for breathless Bayhem at its most gleefully cool and cruel. It has bullets, blood splatters, and bodies splattered and splayed — a crooked general killed in slow-mo with a gunshot through a cigar he’s smoking; every car crash sending bodies flipping out of windshields and side doors. It has large-scale stunts and impressive high-speed driving, every angle chosen for velocity and carnage stunningly shot and staged. In the rare down times we see, lovingly photographed, Bay’s other recurring images: product placement, ladies’ long legs, glowing screens, and dazzling architecture flying by in whip-fast establishing shots that linger and leer just long enough to get the visual pleasure. It tells you everything you need to know about the film’s aesthetic that, after one of the film’s team of protagonists is speared by a forklift, the group’s funeral dinner is Captain Morgan and pizza. Or that there’s a car chase through an art museum scored to a dubstep “O Fortuna.” Not since Bad Boys II has this vulgar auteur been extended a free hand for a blank check hard-R pulp action vision so untrammeled. He spent the last twelve years in franchise land, helming five Transformers movies (some good, others not) that bent the kids' toyline mythos to his style, with brief detours for a bombastic satirical true-crime picture (Pain & Gain) and a gory militaristic siege movie (13 Hours). Here he’s back in the world of macho braggarts, fast cars, machine guns, and mini-skirts that made his name back in the mid-90s days of The Rock and the first Bad Boys. This movie has a simple story told convolutedly. We have a ragtag quasi-vigilante black ops team of experts who’ve faked their own deaths to move around the world secretly. (When asked if The President signed off on the plan, one quips, “No, he can’t even spell it.”) There’s a tech guy (Ryan Reynolds, now in a permanent state of semi-Deadpool energy), a spy (Melanie Laurent), a doctor (Adria Arjona), a hit man (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a parkour guy (Ben Hardy), a sniper (Corey Hawkins), and a driver (Dave Franco). There’s an evil dictator (duh) in a stereotypically vague faux-Third World country, and the protagonists are gonna take him down. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese’s screenplay has a whole lot of repetitive rigamarole between just three action sequences of incredible duration and complication, with lots of cross-cut suspense and violence and all manner of stunt work at the highest level of skill. Explosions! Profanity! Geysers of blood and sparks and water and smoke! Dizzying heights and incredible combat! It’s cranked up and spat out—fast movement, vibrant colors, collateral damage—at the audience in balletic brutality and eye-popping intensity. So loud and splashy it’s a shame most will stream it on Netflix, it proves Bay remains one of the only maximalist stylists operating at this budget level who can wield the effects for maximum impact while still allowed to foreground his own preoccupations, for better or worse, in every frame.

Here Comes the Boom:TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

Now five films deep, it’s hard to call the Transformers series anything more than “barely narrative.” Sure, there are recurring motifs and a familiar ensemble of returning characters, but any sense of a coherent story or mythology capable of being grokked stopped in the end credits of the first – and best – installment. With Transformers: The Last Knight, director Michael Bay seems more than ever invested in the movie only insofar as it allows and affords him the ability to stage whatever kind of bombastic set piece he wants. This is franchise filmmaking as a bajillion-dollar playground where he can build, play with, and blow up anything: a submarine, a castle, a small town, Stonehenge. Why not? He can get away with this because he’s such a great imagemaker. There’s nothing like seeing his brand of spectacle – the grade-A Bayhem – carted on screen by the metric ton. Frame by frame this movie sparkles with sunsets and vast vistas and impressive effects and awestruck hero shots. But, of course, it’s also in service of a series that’s long since passed into irretrievably convoluted gobbledygook. This iteration doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessors, but it doesn’t scrape the barrel’s bottom like their lows, either. A middle of the road Transformers it is then.

At least the screenplay cobbled together by four writers recognizes that the Transformer destruction playing out over the last four films would leave the world rattled. We join the story in progress, with the world terrorized by all the gigantic alien shapeshifting automotive robots who have landed and continue to arrive on a seemingly unstoppable basis. With Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) missing, the Autobots just roam the planet doing whatever, getting into scrapes with Decepticons who still have their leader, Megatron (Frank Welker). That Transformers are sufficiently mindless to need their strong leaders to give them purpose is certainly strange, and makes them dangerous. Humans have decreed them illegal, and deputized an international paramilitary force to hunt them and anyone helping them. The conflict is that, once again, there’s a world-ending calamity coming, provoked by bad ‘bots, and the humans must allow the Transformers to fight it out for the fate of the planet. Tagging along with the junkpiles gurgling crass one-liners in the voices of beloved character actors (John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Steve Buscemi, Jim Carter) are the token humans: last movie’s hero (Mark Wahlberg’s hilariously named Cade Yeager), the military liaison from the first three movies (Josh Duhamel), and new characters like a scrappy orphan teen (Isabela Moner), a scatterbrained Englishman (Anthony Hopkins), and a supermodel, in good looks and frequent inexplicable wardrobe changes, historian (Laura Haddock). Bay needs these human-sized caricatures to sell the plot’s stakes and scale.

There’s no need to recap the nonsense except to say it hurtles through frantic globe-trotting (Chicago! South Dakota! England! Cuba! Africa!) and alternative history digressions (Bay squeezes in a lengthy King Arthur prologue and a World War II flashback) on its way to the expected oversized explosive finale with alien floating weapons and enormous energy pulses and endlessly complicated competing schemes to destroy and/or save the planet. It’s cut together with manic editing and an eardrum-quaking sound design. Get Bill Hader’s Stefon to describe it. This Transformers has everything: fire-breathing baby dino-bots, a potty-mouthed steampunk robo-butler, a floating alien tech witch, comic relief characters played by funny guys (like Jarrod Carmichael and Tony Hale) for whom no one wrote jokes, the United States freeing evil robots on a Dirty Dozen work program, bean-bag-shooting drones, a three-headed dragon built from a dozen interlocking mechanical Knights of the Round Table, John Turturro. Any movie that starts with Stanley Tucci playing Merlin (and yet he’s not an ancestor of the character Tucci played in the last movie?) and gets to Mark Wahlberg sword-fighting a Transformer (and that’s before Stonehenge blows up as the nexus of ancient robot evil) is certainly following its own bizarre id. The movie is all hollering and hurtling, cleavage and calamities, in between Bay’s usual aggressive humor and loud exposition and leering camera ramping up even small dialogue scenes as concussive clattering exertions. 

By the end I stumbled out dazed, deafened, and defeated by the volume (in noise and dimension) of the experience. But it was not entirely unenjoyable to sit back and allow the pummeling. Bay’s genius, and it is genius, is as one of the only modern blockbuster filmmakers who has figured out how to make digital and physical effects work together to create a sense of weight and scale. (Just look at any given Marvel movie, which will be competently handled, and maybe even a better coherent story most of the time, but will have all the tangible qualities of a CG laser light show.) Bay places figures – or spinning bodies, clouds of debris, blasts of fire, and so on – in frames arranged to provide contrasts, to accentuate size and scope, to emphasize motion and speed. Then he sets out sealing the deal with stomach-churning heights and dips, awe-filled low-angle shots of towering monstrosities, precision chaos. He makes the IMAX screen a massive mural tribute to action cinema. A car chase is filmed from as low to the pavement as possible, feeling the grit of the roadway as a character hangs out the door while Bumblebee shoots an evil cop car. A squadron of drones are placed just so to allow a character to leap from one to another, saving himself after getting thrown out the glass back panel of an elevator. A massive structure rising from the ocean drips waterfalls human figures must dodge as they, soaked, run to the aid of their robotic allies. Though not as memorable as the series’ high-water marks, these are sights you might find worth seeing and feeling, but only if you’ve already committed to sitting through the whole jumbled pandemonium anyway.

Under Siege:13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI

Turning the 2012 attack on an American ambassador in Libya into a bombastic Michael Bay action movie is not exactly the most respectful way of honoring those who fought and those who died there. But it sure is a whole lot better than the opportunistic conspiracy theory peddling and witch-hunt investigating right-wing voices engaged in over the past few years. At least 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi admits it doesn’t know why the attack happened, and can’t quite figure out if there’s any one person, aside from the attackers, at fault in a haze of panic, bureaucracy, secrecy, error, and confusion that prolonged the tragedy. Aside from his usual muddled blend of broad symbolism, big explosions, and dubious politics, here Bay’s committed to the experience of the 13-hour siege, staging swirling chaos and horrific violence in scenes of tense commotion and concussive firepower. Here war is both hell, and disorienting as hell.

The film drops into Benghazi a few months out from the incident, introducing the status quo. A well-armed security team (including John Krasinski and James Badge Dale) keeps watch over a secret CIA base (led by David Costabile), a dynamic Bay plays as fitting with his usual world view: macho brawn makes right, and nebbishy intellectuals should agree or get out the way. Meanwhile, the state department, represented by Ambassador Stevens (Matt Letscher), has its own compound, guarded by just a few men. In sweaty, tense set-up, the screenplay by Chuck Hogan (The Strain) makes it clear that the American diplomats and spies want to make good relationships with the locals, while the soldiers view them with suspicion. “You can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys,” one growls, trying to stay alert and alive by simplifying and reducing an entire population to one suspect group.

Soon enough, the movie skips ahead to the night in question. Faceless waves of local attackers appear, first at the embassy, then later at the CIA compound. Emerging from shadows and through fields of tall grass and ominous bombed out debris, they might as well be zombie hordes. We don’t know who they are or what they want. We just know it’s an us-or-them battle for survival. But it’s not only the enemy that remains vague. Bay’s film is loaded with unambiguous value judgments of the sort his films usually feature. Soldiers are always manly good, suits are always weak, women always need to be humbled, and foreigners are always bad, or at least unknowable and scary. What passes for character work are scenes of guys joshing during downtime. A long sequence of button-pushing sentimentality that occurs before the combat begins – every American soldier gets a tearful call home to beaming wives and children – is supposed to give the largely uncharacterized and sparsely differentiated ensemble of bearded gruff dudes extra oomph of emotional firepower once the bullets and bombs start flying.

The attack, which takes up most of the film’s 144-minute run time, is sensationally staged Bay-hem in full force. In some ways it is as sensationalistic as his Transformers movies, loving the thump of weapons shooting, the impact of a detonation, the deceptive fragility of a vehicle in the crossfire, the flesh-tearing power of ordnance. He enjoys staging the action, lingering on the hardware, staring with engaged curiosity at the devices, even repeating his memorable Pearl Harbor shot following a bomb as it falls out of the sky and into American servicemen below. But because this is a real tragedy, and a recent one, he finds some welcome mournful notes, ramping up the visceral gore and smoke to play up the fear and confusion. None of the soldiers know the extent of the attack, the reasons behind it, or where the next threat is coming from. They just hunker down and follow their training, knowing significant help is too far away, and what little they can do is constantly stymied by the rapidly changing facts on the ground.

It’s a deliberate geopolitical Rorschach test, messily lining up with what you already think about this event, and about American foreign policy in general. Other than brief shots of the White House and Pentagon, the government isn’t represented, and as far as the soldiers are concerned, they just want to get home, expressing both a sense of duty and a sense of uncertainty of purpose. And aside from token good Libyans, the film mostly treats the crowds as obstacles and threats. It’s a problematic stew of half-digested ideology, but there’s not a lot to chew on – it’s too garbled on a thematic level beyond ogling its heroes determination and toughness. No, this is basically a war film all about the action, finding compelling and striking ways of framing intense combat. Bay works with cinematographer Dion Beebe (Edge of Tomorrow, Miami Vice) to create grimy digital beauty (sleek and dirt-speckled) out of firefights lighting up a dim back alley, eerie drone shots floating helplessly above the violence, a crowd of dangerous figures creeping towards a compound viewed through night vision goggles, mortar fire streaking skyward against the sunrise.

It’s as handsomely mounted and serious a production as Bay has ever attempted, like his Pearl Harbor stripped of most of its melodrama, or Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down without the cold and rigorous precision. But of course it is, after all, still a Michael Bay movie, complete with his usual stylistic indulgences: glamorous slow-motion violence, canted low-angle shots of people getting out of cars, and conspicuous product placement. (Worst is McDonald’s, for its prominent placement in a scene where a soldier calls home and talks to his family while they’re in a drive-thru.) 13 Hours is impactful and technically accomplished, an intense amalgamation of weary jingoism and tense survivalist impulses. For every dazzling, heart-stopping round of fire, and every chest-whomping bass thump Foley effect, there’s a queasy mixture of genre pleasure, bloody red meat, and mournful uncertainty. It is blunt action filmmaking eager to conflate Hollywood craftsmanship and U.S. military might. Perhaps its greatest accomplishment is allowing its confusing chaos of violence – and its causes and effects – to stand as a messy, imperfect, ambiguous, and exhausted response to endless, and senseless, bloodshed, telling you to make of it what you will.

Robo-Schlock: TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION

Non-stop noise of the auditory and visual kind, Transformers: Age of Extinction is the fourth in Michael Bay’s growing franchise of movies about extraterrestrial robots that turn into vehicles and back again in order to fight each other, destroying major human cities in the process. This time involves two new factions of bad Transformers and a complicated mythology that’s both important and completely incomprehensible. It makes me yearn for the comparatively small 2007 original, which at least paused for some quieter moments and crafted stock human characters you could almost care about. Extinction is nearly three hours long and makes not a lick of sense, preferring instead to hurtle sensations at the screen in an overpowering display of digital pyrotechnics that grows monotonous and assaultive. At least it's not as bad as Revenge of the Fallen.

The good alien robots, Autobots, who fight the bad alien robots, Decepticons, last time left the Chicago Loop thoroughly crumbled in a terrific hour-long battle sequence – the franchise’s best – that redeemed that film’s lousy opening 90 minutes. Naturally, the humans weren’t too happy about all that death and destruction. They’ve begun a campaign to destroy all the robots. A grumpy CIA man (Kelsey Grammer) glowers in dark rooms and sends his black ops team (led by Titus Welliver) to hunt the robots down. Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg is a small-town Texas inventor who happens upon a busted semi, takes it back to his shop, and discovers that it’s really the Autobot leader Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen). When the Feds storm his house in scary black SWAT vans looking for the robo-leader, Wahlberg, his 17-year-old daughter (Nicola Peltz), and her racecar-driving boyfriend (Jack Reynor) go on the run with the Autobots.

The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in the crazy Transformers world, but they sure hang around anyway. They are mere connective tissue, putting a human face and scale on what is really a conflict between Transformers. In Ehren Kruger’s dumb script, the latest Decepticon iteration is still out there, along with a new kind of Transformer that flies in on the most massive robot spaceship yet, carrying a MacGuffin cargo, hunting the Autobots for some reason, and threatening the end of the world. Their leader turns into a gun with legs, so you know they’re dangerous. There’s also a bunch of ancient Transformers who turn into dinosaurs. They show up late in the picture, just to escalate the size of the destruction all the more. It should be fun, but it’s endless and exhausting.

I’ll confess to not remembering what brought these robots to Earth in the first place or understanding why, after people don’t want them around, they don’t just leave. “I swore never to take another human life,” Optimus intones at one point, apparently forgetting about the thousands of deaths in the previous 3½ films up to then. I don’t get it. Here they fight across a small town in Texas, then to Chicago (again), before the whole calamity ends up in Hong Kong for the climactic conflagration, leaving a trail of rubble and corpses behind them. The Autobots have a Randian insistence that they’re good because they say so, and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy. It’s off-putting. The convoluted plot involving various factions of robot-kind and competing human interests makes very little sense, but the action keeps rolling on and on, never pausing to catch its breath. Dialogue comes in staccato shouts buried in the sound mix so as to register only as exclamatory grunts and screams.

Rarely is the end-credit disclaimer “Any resemblance to actual people is coincidental” so apt. At least national treasure Stanley Tucci shows up as an energetic wild card. He alone holds his own as an interesting and enjoyable flesh-and-blood presence amongst the computerized jumble. Wahlberg is earnest, but swallowed by the spectacle around him. The camera slobbers all over Peltz’s long tan legs and short shorts, cutting away periodically to flustered reactions from various people, trying to wring sex appeal and pearl-clutching Puritanical humor out of the same character. She’s in the movie to be ogled and protected, either way treated as property. At one point, she’s caught in a bad robot ship and the two men in her life have this exchange. Wahlberg: “You’re helping save my daughter.” Reynor: “No, you’re helping save my girlfriend.” Forgive me if I didn’t care which man wins the right to own her.

I could mostly track the human motivations. But the robots? I was lost. I couldn’t tell them apart, had no idea what their end goals were, and couldn’t figure out why an alien space robot would look vaguely like a samurai and sound like Ken Watanabe, or appear to be inspired by Walter Sobchak with the voice of John Goodman to match. Not only dehumanizing in its endless nonsensical destruction and post-human in its outlook, the movie was, to me, beyond comprehension. That’s not to say I wasn’t entertained. It has its moments of crazed fantastic imagery of spinning doodads and magic hour car chases. Its two truly thrilling moment of danger involves our human leads walking above the former Sears’ Tower on thin cables and, later, dangling on the side of a towering apartment complex in Hong Kong. Falling. Now there’s a threat I get.

In typical Michael Bay fashion, the movie is a long, excessive display of a boyish arrested adolescent id, all machinery, explosions, machismo, flashes of skin, and libertarianism. He’s a bullying filmmaker, pushing intensity upon the audience at headache-making speed, always ready to throw hate on nerdy characters for a throwaway gag. Bay works without a filter. He’s always putting his whole messy, hypocritical, weird, cutting-edge/retrograde, complicated self up on screen, for good and bad. But he has an undeniable eye. He’s capable of making fun entertainments with his anything-goes, over-the-top, amped-up, explosive, glossy style. His gigantism is impressive. In another time, he would’ve made underrated Poverty Row B-movies, Grindhouse cult classics, beloved midnight movies. But he arrived at a time when Hollywood was looking for just his kind of gigantic indulgence for their biggest pictures, spilling noise and spectacle in indiscriminate clamor and cacophony.

I’ve liked as many of his movies as I haven’t, but when his action works it is because the goals make sense, the characters are vividly drawn, and the imagery snaps together with pleasingly chaotic momentum. Bay’s always making thunderous pop art nonsense, but increasing freedom with his spectacle has led to films that are out of control. Last year’s dark caper Pain & Gain, an overblown, almost-subliminal, autocritique, is a clear outlier. At this point, his hyperactive deadly asteroid disaster picture Armageddon, all the way back in 1998, seems almost an example of narrative economy. And about that one critic Bilge Ebiri wrote, “Its awesome gratuitousness borders on the experimental.” Extinction is big and dumb, but his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. Loud, crass, violent, obnoxious, and a complete narrative and thematic mess, it’s cut together with supreme sloppiness and grindingly empty in all respects.

I’ve seen the trailer for Extinction quiet a chatty crowd instantly with its compelling imagery and intensity of motion. But string together shots of clattering junkheap machines slamming into each other while humans flee and fight below for three hours with only a flimsy plot and nothing characters behind it and it grows hard to take. There are real thrills here, fascinating shots and terrific effects work, but he’s a director who never knows when enough is enough. It’s what makes him so compelling and repelling, even in the same film. This one can be exciting and ugly, but is mostly grindingly dull. It’s unmodulated ear-splitting confusion. For a movie with nothing to say, it sure spends a long time loudly saying it.

I get the feeling the ultimate Bay film would do without plot altogether. It’d be Victoria’s Secret models on an American flag runway at an auto show, a bad standup comic ranting about women and immigrants, and fleets of helicopters fighting a sentient factory in the middle of a Linkin Park concert. Then, fireworks.

Dumbbells: PAIN & GAIN

Michael Bay is Hollywood’s preeminent vulgarian. With movies like Armageddon and Transformers, he specializes in slick imagery that turns a gleaming gaze on people and technology with the same slobbering glee, an objectification that turns everything into button-pushing jolts of spectacle, collateral damage, and queasy humor that leans on distasteful stereotypes more often than not. This sometimes leads to enjoyable movies, sometimes not, but it certainly makes him the right person to direct Pain & Gain, a based-on-a-true-story caper about some lunkheads with big small dreams who basically imagine themselves the heroes of their own Michael Bay movie. His proudly juvenile adrenaline machines in which an outsized id runs free through a glamorously ugly caricature world fits with a story so grotesque and unbelievable it simply must be true (or at least exaggerated from the truth).

The action takes place in Miami during 1994 and 1995. There at the time Bay was filming his feature debut, the cop buddy action comedy Bad Boys. So, alas, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the main character of this movie, instead cites Rocky, Scarface and The Godfather as his cinematic motivation. He, conveniently forgetting the ultimate fate of the protagonists of those films, thinks of them as good examples of guys who made something of themselves, something to aspire to as he prepares to chase his American dream: lots of money, lots of things, and lots of pretty women. He has what he thinks is a great get-rich-quick plan, a sure-fire all-American, get-what’s-coming-to-him windfall. When questioned about his scheme he says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.”

And what is Daniel's plot? He has happened to gain a new client, rich jerk Victor (Tony Shalhoub), who walked into Sun Gym looking for a personal trainer. He’s the kind of guy who says, “You know who invented salads? Poor people.” He’s not a nice guy. Daniel's idea is to recruit two of his co-workers, the steroidal Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and the born-again Paul (Dwayne Johnson), to help kidnap Victor, make him sign over all his assets blindfolded, and then return him to his routine unable to do anything about it. That sounds easy enough, if rather implausible and with countless details that need to be worked out. But Daniel doesn’t seem to notice those and his partners in crime don’t ask many questions. They all think they’re about to get rich beyond their wildest dreams. Here’s a group of guys smart enough to cook up a scheme, but too dumb to get away unscathed.

The script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely gives us overlapping narration from all three men and their victim, giving us four perspectives on the events as they unfold. The dissonance between the confidence they constantly speak to us and each other, the pumped-up sheen of Bay’s filmmaking, and the string of dumb decisions they proceed to make provides a recipe for a savage pitch black comedy. When things start to go wrong, as you know they must, it turns into a kind of humid, sun-baked Fargo. (There’s a nasty bit of business with a pile of dismembered limbs that rivals that film’s wood chipper scene.) Bay shoots it all with a smug satisfaction, snickering at these meatheads for buying so whole-heartedly into the American dream of having it all and getting away with it that they can’t see it’s a lie with which all truly successful people learn to compromise. Early on, Wahlberg attends a lecture from a transparently phony motivational speaker (Ken Jeong) and leaves feeling nothing but starry-eyed confidence. Yes, he thinks, even he can make his dreams of obscene wealth come true. That he should go about it in a brutal, haphazard, illegal way is a source of the humor, but in the insistence that perhaps he’s a fool to try anything at all, the film is cynical, nihilistic social satire to its core.

There are no heroes here. The criminals are misguided lugs impossible to root for. Their victim is a smarmy slimeball who’s impossible to wish victory upon. Bay puts the audience in the sometimes uncomfortable position of simply watching the gears of plot turn on these awful people. The late edition of a private eye played by Ed Harris as a weary pragmatist and the only person of professional competence in the whole movie and as such seems to be subtextually shaking his head at the sad weirdness of it all, like Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, does much to help cut through the ugliness. But what sometimes beautiful ugliness! Bay’s muscular showiness is put to good use here, laying out tawdry, glittery lifestyles of the almost rich and gaudily infamous-in-their-own-minds, lives that play out sadly in gyms, strip clubs, and on Floridian beaches.

There’s huge entertainment to be had in the rapid-fire montage that keeps the pace speedy throughout the entire two-hour-plus runtime and the collision of light performances with the heavy dark violence and vulgarity. Instead of risking the audience lose track of his satirical point, Bay makes it quite clear that he’s in on the joke. As brutish satire, it makes its jabs early and finds only ways to repeat them thereafter. Luckily the performers (I haven’t even mentioned fun supporting roles filled by Rob Corddry, Bar Paly and Rebel Wilson) are agile and funny and the story itself is strange and unpredictable enough to keep things interesting. It’s a credit to the great cast, twisty plot, and Bay’s aggressively watchable, just-shy-of garishly colorful style that I didn’t grow tired. I didn’t love it or loathe it, but I think I had fun.

Loud Noises: TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON

At the center of these Transformers movies are the perfect metaphors for describing them, huge incompressible shape shifting junk heaps that occasionally assemble into aesthetically pleasing vehicles. Aren’t these movies essential just that, occasionally pleasing junk? Directed by Michael Bay at his what was then his most excessive, the first movie, from 2007, might be his best movie. It’s a triumph of machinery, both the creatures and the Hollywood mechanisms of their birth, the kinds of gleaming metal and kinetic action that Bay has always focused on. Here they become the goofiest, most explosive expression of his style, his canted angles and saturated colors that turn every shot into a music-video/advertisement hybrid, popping each shot with the crisp vibrancy of slick commercialism. The controlled chaos fell into disproportionate anarchy with the sequel, 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen. That film, though still capable of fleeting moments that are visually striking, was tonally incoherent and offensively stereotypical on most every level.

Here we go again, with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which splits the difference between the two approaches to the same material. This time, it’s in 3D, which at least serves to slow down Bay’s typically rapid-fire editing, if only by a few blinks per shot. The spectacle has to wait, though. For a good hour, perhaps even 90 minutes, Bay spins his wheels with crude humor, offensive stereotypes, and endless, elaborate setup.

Shia LaBeouf, having saved the world twice, is out looking for a job, jealous that his glamorous girlfriend (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a former Victoria’s Secret model in her first acting job) is getting so much attention from her sleazy boss (Patrick Dempsey). The job search is a bit of a stall while the robots gather up the plot points that will lead to eventual mayhem, though it gives screen time to a self-amused John Malkovich, and a small role for Ken Jeong that is both racist and homophobic at the same time. As for the elaborate romantic setup, it never really pays off, unless you’re so inclined to count the huge close-up 3D shot of Huntington-Whiteley’s rear end walking up a flight of stairs that serves as her first appearance.

Meanwhile, the Autobots (those are the good guys) are still working with the military, led by Josh Duhamel, to sniff out Decepticons (those are the bad guys) but also blow up terrorists for some reason. The movie joylessly gives us an unintentionally hilarious description of said terrorists’ hideout as “Illegal Middle Eastern Nuclear Site.” Phew. As long as it’s illegal. That’s a sequence that wouldn’t look too out-of-place in Team America: World Police.

Taking a break from working for America, the Autobots just uncovered some top-secret stuff about the true reasons behind the U.S./Russian space race of the 60’s and the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl. I’m normally untroubled by seeing alternate history in pop sci-fi (this summer’s X-Men uses the Cuban Missile Crisis to good effect) but here it comes off sleazy and uncomfortable, especially with waxy CGI presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and even Obama) mixed in with the tweaked historical footage. Later, the movie will take visual cues from the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Ugh.

Moving on, there’s a lot to slog through. Buzz Aldrin cameos playing himself, staring up at Optimis Prime, the leader of the Autobots while admitting that, yes, there is indeed an ancient hibernating transformer (Leonard Nimoy) buried on the moon. Bill O’Reily has an interminably smug cameo needling John Turturro’s grating ex-government official. (I pause here to note that the reliably funny Alan Tudyk plays Turturro’s assistant). Frances McDormand collects a paycheck as an Intelligence chief interested in letting the ‘bots find and collect the long-dormant tech off of the moon. In a movie called Transformers: Dark of the Moon we get far too few Transformers and very little moon for all of this time. The movie is scene after scene of humans setting up what we all really want to see: stuff blowing up real good. The first film was actually a competent teen comedy that shifted effortlessly into a goofy sci-fi explosion of action, but after those giant robots have been slamming around writer Ehren Kruger has had no idea how to make just normal people interesting. To be fair he didn’t write the first movie, just the bad second two. All this human setup would be excusable in smaller, more economical doses, or if the robots’ plots made any sense whatsoever.

I won’t take this opportunity to dissect the many ways the logic of the various robot plans do not work. Instead, I will reflect on the fact that giant, largely indistinguishable robots are roaming the planet causing all kinds of ruckus and they’re still supposedly a secret. These creatures are also apparently intuitive geniuses, able to predict the plans of their enemies to an astonishingly accurate level. Take a scene wherein some rolling metal robots emerge to attack Shia on a highway, which leads to a striking 3D composition in which a car unfolds into a Transformer from around its passenger, beats back debris, then turns back into a car with the passenger returned safely to his seat. It makes not a lick of sense and I couldn’t tell you what this brief action sequence accomplishes in terms of plot or who did what to who and why, but it sure looked good for that brief moment.

For all I really disliked about the endless set-up, I was shocked to find that the pay-off almost, almost, made up for it. The action in the last hour or so moves to Chicago where Decepticons are taking over the city for some reason. Humans, after standing by powerless, and Autobots, after cowardly hiding while humans were massacred, roll into town to fight back. The resulting distended urban warfare action set piece is surprisingly effective. It’s well paced and mostly comprehensible, or at least there are clear goals that must be accomplished for the good guys to win. Chicago is thoroughly cluttered in the process. There’s a nifty Decepticon that’s like a metal Sarlacc pit on wheels. There’s good use of 3D to enhance huge drops and dips between skyscrapers. It’s dumb, loud summery sound and fury, and it works on a brute force level. One nearly great sequence with a teetering skyscraper, for example, has nice cliffhanger inventiveness. Bay may often make awkward, frighteningly tone-deaf films, but, when he’s using his eye for forcefully effective action imagery, I’d rather see a pure Michael Bay film than someone else trying to crib from his bag of tricks, like the thoroughly awful Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year.

I didn’t end up leaving the theater completely hating Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but it’s only because the last hour distracted me from the opening 90 minutes. Upon reflection, dissatisfaction settles in along with the convoluted plot’s sheer idiocy and memory of the horrendous human plot with its endless failed attempts at humor. So, just good enough to very nearly distract from how bad it is, there’s a backhanded compliment for you.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Despite being based on a line of action figures and a terrible 80s animated series, Transformers was a fast, fun summer movie with satisfying human comedy, a good grasp on its goofy tone, and cool special effects, even if the last twenty minutes devolved into a mess of incomprehensibility. With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Michael Bay has created a film that expands every aspect of his first film, a move that destroys the precarious balance of the comedy, loses sight of the inherent goofiness of the concept, and uses its special effects so often that they become numbing. Not even an intense booming explosion that resonates with a deep bass kick in the climax of the movie could shake me out of my bludgeoned state. I guess the creators thought audiences liked the incomprehensibility the best. The experience of watching the movie is not unlike untangling blinking Christmas lights while listening to all of your dishes fall out of the cupboards.

Once again there are human actors stranded amidst the vehicles that turn into giant robots, but this time they can’t hold their own against the mostly-indistinguishable clanging CGI monstrosities. Where’s someone like Jon Voight or Anthony Anderson from the first movie? They both played the material with just the right amount of winking but are missing here. Why do other similarly lighthearted performers from before – John Turturro, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese Gibson – get swallowed up by bad writing and self-importance? (Don’t even get me started on Julie White and Kevin Dunn, for whom I’m just embarrassed). Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox are also in the movie but make so little impact – neither is given any great distinct moments – that they are hardly worth mentioning despite being the ostensible stars of the thing.

The plot involves giant bad robot people who want to find this other big machine to kill humans and the giant good robot people that try to stop them, but even that, believe it or not, takes a back seat to the mindless action that’s little more than militaristic fetishism and rampant misogyny, ethnocentricity, and racism. The only thing Bay’s camera lingers on more than cleavage and explosions are the gleaming weaponry of robot and man alike. All women are either excessively emotional or cold-hearted man-killers (or maybe even robots in disguise). All scenes that take place in foreign countries showcase a startling condescension, using natives for comedic effect or background props and using the basest shorthand for displaying foreign cultures. And then there’s the matter of the two shuffling, illiterate, exaggeratedly incompetent and idiotic, jive-talking Transformers who are practically blackface robots. Need I say more?

I could barely tell the robots apart, could barely understand what most of them were saying, and barely cared about the exposition that both they and the humans were force to spell out. There’s no scene to match the first film’s great comedy of the exposition that reveals the true nature of the Hoover Dam. To say that the script was written with a tin-ear would insult all the great hacks out there who use their tin-ears to competent effect. What went wrong with this script? Two of the writers are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, who have written fine popcorn flicks like the first Transformers and the great recent Star Trek. I hesitate to lay the blame with them since their record has been so spotless. What about the third credited writer, Ehren Kruger? He’s mostly written horror movies (some of them bad) but I think his influence is felt mostly in the creepy scenes of mechanical intrusions, like when LeBeouf finds himself with an itty-bitty robot crawling up his nostrils. Is the blame then to lie with Michael Bay, who supposedly did some work during the Writers’ strike? It’s possible. Or maybe the script is a result of clashing styles and tones and a rushed schedule which resulted in no ideas being thrown out? It certainly feels at times like a filmed brainstorming session. It’s a total mess.

There are two kinds of Michael Bay movies: dumb fun and just dumb. Can you guess which one this is by now? The movie is everything that is wrong with big-budget sequels. It’s long, formless, and indigestible. It’s scenes of endless noisy nonsense punctuated only by more scenes of endless noisy nonsense, and then it goes on for over two-and-a-half hours. I left with nothing more than a headache.