Michael Bay: Directing Hack or Genius?

I always hated Michael Bay, but then I watched Pain and Gain, and I realised that he does have it in him to appeal to me. This was amazing, and yet still Michael Bay all over. It was his style right through, it even had some big explosions, only this time they were useful, and not just eye candy. This was genuinely a brilliant, and unfortunately, misunderstood film.

Don't promise tomorrow, it's not yours to give.

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The problem is Bay has exceedingly chosen spectacle over any form of substance. But you are correct. In the staging and filming of ACTION Bay is untouchable. But his films usually have more and more failed in putting forth much less of a cohesive story or characters you really care to follow (this film being one of the few films, since Transformers 1, exceptions). He's continually had AMAZING Oscar caliber cats who've been wasted.

I'd love to see Bay working miss with a REAL script and some action. We could be in for something special.

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Michael Bay: Directing Hack or Genius?

Judging by the insane number of positive threads about this movie (insane, in this case, qualifying as "any number greater than zero"), I'd say the answer to that question is "both."

With that said Michael Bay is still one of the best action directors working today.

This is just crazy talk.

No other director alive can craft images and action sequences that looks like a Michael Bay film, and trust me his style has been ripped off more times over the last twenty years than I can count.

Yes, he has a style, which mostly consists of shoving as many moving things on the screen at once, moving those things as fast as possible, and blowing them up in big explosions. The thing is that none of these things are absolutely necessary to make a good action sequence, and too much of those things actually has the opposite effect: it makes them really boring. When Bay does his thing at his best, it makes me want to turn the movie off. If I can't comprehend what is going on in an action scene, then it might as well not even be there. Michael Bay has a knack for making the most boring action scenes ever.

Regarding his style, there's probably one or two things I actually like about it. His movies tend to be pretty colorful, and the lighting is usually great, but that's about it.

I liked 'Bad Boys' and 'The Rock' and I even kinda liked 'The Island.' I don't specifically hate Michael Bay movies just because it's Michael Bay, but those other movies have a distinctly different feel to them than 'Transformers' or 'Pain & Gain.' It just seems to me that lately, he has no interest in doing movies anymore, he just wants to do giant CGI action sequences. If he even attempts to do an actual story, he fails miserably.

'Pain & Gain' was absolutely terrible, and completely tone-deaf. I had no idea it was a Michael Bay movie when I decided to watch it, but after maybe ten minutes of watching it was obvious. It's filled with juvenile attempts at humor, terrible characters that are completely unlikable (seriously, nobody in this movie is likable), and a complete disrespect of its source material and the real people behind it. It tries to be both comedic and dramatic, but awkwardly alternates between the two and never quite meshes them correctly. In at least one scene it openly mocks the people watching the movie (the scene with the motivational speaker and the fat, retarded audience that is watching him: that's you, the movie viewer, that's what Michael Bay thinks of you). I could be wrong about that, it could have just been yet another failed attempt at humor, but either Michael Bay hates everyone including the people who watch his movies, or he's just that inept and clueless that he doesn't realize what he's making.

If you go to a Michael Bay movie expecting a deep, intellectually challenging film then you are jumping on the wrong Autobot. What Michael Bay does have is an amazing eye for composing shots, creating new angles and camera movements you haven’t seen on screen before.

There's a reason why many filmmakers use established techniques and rules of thumb when making movies, and that's because they work. Michael Bay has done some fine action scenes, no doubt, and the 'Bad Boys' movies are mostly good examples of that. But he obviously doesn't know when to stop. It doesn't matter what angle or movement you have in the frame when the frame is so cluttered that it's impossible to follow. It just turns into noise, and that's where he's at now. He makes noise. He needs to tone it down a bit and go back to making decent action movies. If he truly had an "amazing eye," he'd notice in the editing process how nonsensical and pointless his action scenes have become. That's why I'm not entirely convinced that he's inept, but that he's purposefully exaggerating his movies, either as some sort of experiment to see how far he can push it, or to give viewers more of what they apparently want to see.

'Pain & Gain' has a 6.5 rating on IMDB. I rated it a 2 and that's probably being way too generous. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen (I still consider that to be 'Babel'), but it's definitely in the discussion.

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