Who Is Michael Bay to Cinema in the 2020s?
A misbegotten figure of late nineties and early two thousands American pop culture and once the defining face of schlocky Hollywood blockbusters, Michael Bay today is someone too hard to concretely define. He’s the paragon of a bygone era in studio filmmaking and yet still not fully embraced by critics or audiences for his singular brand of cinematic flair (aptly dubbed Bayhem) or his long-standing influence among various established and upcoming filmmakers. Though occasionally still an easy punching bag for older Millennials who find it comical to dunk on a filmmaker who was critically reviled during a very different period in the industry, Bay’s critical reception has seen a bit of a reappraisal. Thanks to the reassessment of several committed vulgar auteurists, a credit which likely belongs to younger Millennial and Gen Z cinephiles who’ve come of age during his cinematic reign, Bay has gained some newfound artistic and cultural legitimacy.
Hollywood has changed quite significantly since the peak of Michael Bay’s career more than a decade ago, but his impact can still be seen in major studios’ continued interest in revisiting the commercially successful works of the past. While 2023’s Transformers prequel failed to recreate the box office numbers (or sheer cinematic force) of Bay’s own films in the franchise, the third and fourth entries in the Bad Boys series, Bad Boys For Life and Bad Boys: Ride or Die, have proven to be more critically and commercially successful than Bay’s first two films released nearly twenty and thirty years ago.
Helmed by the directing duo of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, it’s easy to see why the pair have been chosen as Bay’s cinematic successors with this franchise. Very few distinctive and original voices have been able to put their stamp on the action genre in today’s Hollywood landscape – Chad Stalheski (John Wick) and Sam Hargrave (Extraction) being among a select few – but El Arbi and Fallah’s work in Bad Boys For Life and more importantly Ride or Die has demonstrated an eye for some really inventive and interesting genre filmmaking; it’s a shame that their Batgirl film was deemed “unreleasable” by sheepish Warner Discovery executives. While the directing duo’s action chops are on full display with each set piece (Ride or Die’s finale featuring an impressive gun-POV camera rig which the actors operate themselves), the film still finds itself in the shadow of Michael Bay.
As directors entering into a series defined by the style and sensibilities of an unparalleled cinematic visionary, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Belgian filmmakers with a background in the crime and action genres, have approached the Bad Boys franchise with a unique reverence for their original architect. From the highly saturated color palette with its heightened orange hues to its vivid Miami golden sunsets, El Arbi and Fallah make good work of paying homage to a signature of Michael Bay’s. While the golden hour shot on a long lens is certainly a feature of Bay’s, one he’s pulled from fellow Simpson/Bruckheimer contemporary Tony Scott (most notably with Top Gun and Days of Thunder), Bay has a unique tether to the specific image reappropriated here. As something of an unofficial cinematic spokesperson for the city of Miami’s debauchery with his Florida gym bro nightmare satire Pain and Gain and his two Bad Boys films, Ride or Die’s recreation of the aforementioned shot functions as a bit of a reference to all three films in Bay’s body of work.
Among Bad Boys: Ride or Die’s most impressive highlights lies Armando’s (Jacob Scipio) prison fight scene. In terms of homage it doesn’t get much more interesting than alluding to what is likely the most vulgar and dismissed film of Michael Bay’s entire filmography, Pain and Gain. Released in 2013 between Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction, the Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie-starring black comedy is a film of Bay’s that is often overlooked, featuring some career best work from The Rock who never misses a note with his incredible comedic punch. He plays a steroidal giant who is not one for a life of crime and, in a flashback, we see him taking on several guys in a prison yard fight which ends in him grabbing a weight from a barbell and hurling it at a guy like a frisbee. In Pain and Gain, the prison fight is but a brief moment in the backstory of Dwayne Johnson’s Paul Doyle, but El Arbi and Fallah extend on this moment by turning it into a legitimate action set piece for Armando in Ride or Die, giving Jacob Scipio the chance to show off some of his athletic capabilities. The scene features some impressive choreography, and its Michael Bay influence comes full circle as Armando grabs a weight and turns it into one of the coolest looking ninja weapons you’re likely to ever see.
While numerous films have attempted to replicate the unique visual style of Michael Bay, like Universal’s Battleship (2012), a failed attempt at recreating the success of his Transformers series, few if any are interested in duplicating his crude and cynical sense of humor. The Pain and Gain reference seen in Bad Boys: Ride or Die makes for a fantastic action scene, but that film also stands out as a distinctively Michael Bay endeavor for how gleeful it comes across in depicting such depravity. To the credit of Ride or Die, the film’s humor, largely driven by the comedic brilliance of Martin Lawrence, is sustained and brought to a comically cynical (and by extension Bay-like conclusion). The story shares a debt to Bad Boys II in the arc of Lawrence’s Marcus as he has a metaphysical experience allowing for some great banter between him and Will Smith’s Mike Lowry. As much as the limits of the humor are pushed with the two characters, there’s an understandable tempering compared to the earlier films in the series. Like the teenage boy demographic Michael Bay claims to make his films for, his comedic sensibilities are often crass, juvenile and problematic. There’s a callousness to his work (and humor) which reaches an early zenith in Bad Boys II and only further evolves with a film like Pain and Gain stoking some quite laughable derision from critics when faced with his pessimistic worldview.
If you truly want to know who Michael Bay is as a director, Bad Boys II is the film that lies at the epicenter of his career. It’s the work of a filmmaker deliberately thumping their nose at their critics – overly indulgent, overly long, hyper stylish and sleazy, ridiculously irreverent, Bad Boys II is an American nightmare like only Michael Bay could conjure. But just a few years before the release of this sequel came another work which informs its existence, Pearl Harbor (2001). A big swing for an already established action filmmaker, Pearl Harbor was an ambitious historical epic that had aspirations of transcending the mere commercial success Michael Bay had seen in the past. The film wound up a poorly calculated attempt by the director to swerve out of his cinematic comfort zone. Instead of crafting something like the melodramatic and swooning romance of James Cameron’s Titanic, Bay made a much bigger, louder and messier action film. Immediately following its critical failure he emerged with a work that embraced every ugly and illicit bit of excess that has come to define his career. In doing so, you could say that Michael Bay was truly born.
While no one thinks Michael Bay was ever playing it safe as he’s literally already referencing his own films by his second outing and getting Sean Connery to deliver lines like “winners go home and f*ck the prom queen”, there’s an unquestionable shift in who the filmmaker was between his debut in 1995 and its follow up eight years later. Bad Boys II seemingly cemented Bay’s perception as a trashy bottom feeding popcorn filmmaker. Having first garnered notoriety as a music video and commercial director with Propaganda Films before he broke into the mainstream, he was once the contemporary of a far more highly regarded filmmaker than himself, David Fincher. Having both gained early acclaim as commercial directors, it’s not too difficult to imagine a comparison between the two as each are distinguished by the particulars of their visual choices. But while Fincher’s career led him down a path of fastidious control to match his visual ingenuity, Michael Bay has always been more interested in chaos (hence the term Bayhem) than any formal austerity.
With the quick succession of his first three films, Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998), a pretty impressive résumé right out of the gates which the Criterion Collection seemed to agree with, Bay quickly established himself as a flashy commercial entity. Having developed all of his films and honed his style under Simpson and Bruckheimer, Bay shed those early comparisons to David Fincher and now looked like another director to find success in Hollywood with the producing pair. Tony Scott, the lesser known of the Scott brothers, made his career as a fine visual craftsman and a great director of movie stars. With the Simpson/Bruckheimer team clearly interested in scooping up directors with flashy music video aesthetics, making sure their films held a certain visual flare, Michael Bay becomes an obvious corollary to the great and underappreciated Tony Scott and his unofficial cinematic ethos of making sure every frame is overflowing with style. While Tony Scott would also never attain the level of critical adulation of other popular filmmakers of his era, he also never saw the level of critical ambivalence that each Michael Bay film would inspire.
As Bay’s visual sensibilities formulated and grew across his first four features, so too did his relationship to Tony Scott. The heightened stylization, the macho sense of hyper masculinity, the fetishization of the military. Naturally, Bay’s filmic approach would lead to similar accusations of style over substance, though Tony Scott would grow into more experimental territory in the 2000s, while Bay expanded his cinematic vocabulary by doubling down on all of his excesses.
While almost any film to make it into the multiplex today devoid of spandex and gray sludge for a color palette might seem like the kind of thing rarely capable of being made anymore, Bay’s Bad Boys II is the kind of film that forces you to stop and think about what you could find in mainstream American cinema just twenty years ago. It’s a work boiling over with toxicity, and if made today would be the subject of countless more think pieces for all of its rampant prejudice and discrimination, and yet it remains a seminal cultural and artistic moment for American filmmaking. The film includes all of these famous images we’ve come to know – the dolly shot going underneath several scantily dressed women in a strip club, the cool rotating dolly shot slipping (digitally) through eyeholes during a shootout, and of course maybe Bay’s defining cinematic offering, “The Bay Shot”, the iconic slowmo-low-angle-rotating-dolly-hero-shot seen throughout his filmography. More than just vulgar and illicit, Bad Boys II becomes Bay’s cinematic thesis statement with the kaleidoscopic parallax of his images ultimately drawing America into the foreground of this nihilistic portrait of Miami police officers run amok.
If you simply looked at the vapid critical response and meagre box office totals compared to its hefty budget, it would seem logical to dismiss Bay’s Bad Boys II, but this would be missing so much of the picture. Bay takes the buddy comedy of his former film and shakes up the formula for something much more frenetic and overstimulating, in the process turning his penchant for excess into a new cinematic language. Expanding on those early formal similarities to Tony Scott, Bay’s bag of tricks (and influences) go much deeper this time around as, like many other filmmakers before and after him, he becomes a cinematic carnivore, digesting the work of numerous other great directors and regurgitating it to create something new.
The Cuba invasion, which leads to a Hummer chase that completely decimates a housing project, is lifted directly from Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985). The climactic shootout between Mike, Marcus and the antagonist Hector is a direct reference to the finale of John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (itself a much underappreciated gem). Citing Steven Spielberg as his early inspiration for becoming a filmmaker with Raiders of the Lost Ark, outside of Tony Scott, Spielberg seems a chief influence on the style of Bay; particularly regarding his eye for blocking and framing, knowing where to position objects in conjunction with the movement of the camera to create dynamic images.
Melding the visual sensibilities of Spielberg, Woo and Scott, this unholy abomination of American pop culture comes to life. While Bad Boys II might not seem to fit into this picture, it is the critical nexus point of Bay’s formulation, succeeding his early career work and being the pivotal precursor to his Transformers films (which only served as the chance to further his toxic agenda into the IP realm). After Bad Boys II, Bay’s unparalleled existence as a uniquely American cultural and cinematic export was more than solidified. Other filmmakers began trying to recreate “The Michael Bay Shot” (like Edgar Wright in Hot Fuzz), but Bay also began to cannibalize his own work over and over again, using it as a baseline for his exceedingly maniacally artistic endeavors. Steven Spielberg starting out as a childhood influence became not just a cinematic contemporary, but also an artistic peer, producing his very next film as well as his Transformers series.
More than twenty years removed from Michael Bay’s Bad Boys II, the critical and cultural perception of the film hasn’t shifted much. As for the filmmaker himself, Bay is a far cry from the commercial giant that he was at his peak, with the industry having seemingly made him irrelevant as his last film Ambulance (2022) failed to draw even $23million at the domestic box office. Yet, amidst the now constant barrage of superfluous big studio dreck and streaming originals which continuously fail to gain even one iota of cultural legitimacy, Michael Bay has re-emerged from the ashes of Hollywood’s soulless reverse vending machine as a diamond in the rough. Though Bay’s reign as the contemporary schlockbuster analog for Steven Spielberg has long expired with studios now more interested in molding personality-deficient filmmakers for their IP slop, Michael Bay is likely more artistically relevant now than he ever was before.
Whether it be reduced to mere nostalgia or simply considered the life cycle of art, Michael Bay’s oeuvre will eventually be put back under the microscope, and though no one will erase the reception that colored the vast majority of his career from the start, whenever this re-examination occurs, a very different director is likely to materialize out of the fog of our current cinematic landscape.
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Written by Dorian Griffin
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