It’s been a long, hot summer covering the ridiculous, action-packed filmography of Michael Bay. I started this project on a whim, something to occupy my time over the summer in the absence of any really good, dumb summer action movies to latch onto. Michael Bay is a relic of a bygone era, when we could rely on those kinds of movies to carry the cultural conversation through the summer. Those movies come few and far between now, and most of them revolve around comic books. Bay has managed to stay refreshingly free from all of that, his stranglehold over the Transformers series notwithstanding.
But now that we’ve finished the series, let’s take a look back and rank all of these films, worst to best.
15) TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (2009)
Getting crapped out amid a Writer’s Guild strike did Bay’s second Transformers movie no favors. Even if it hadn’t, I still can’t imagine a bigger assault on the senses than this. Aggressively mean-spirited, casually racist to the point of xenophobia, and hopelessly disjointed, Revenge of the Fallen might genuinely be one of the worst summer blockbusters ever made. A few indelible images (Shia LeBeouf dying and going to Robot Heaven is still pretty great) and a couple of memorable characters don’t make up for what a completely unpleasant experience this is.
Where Revenge of the Fallen‘s sins are legion, The Island commits the sin of being just plain fucking boring. It’s nothing we haven’t seen from half a dozen better movies, gussied up with Bay’s trademark bombast and music video sheen. Ewan McGregor gets to play a couple scenes against himself, which is fun enough while it lasts, but this Logan’s Run riff runs out of gas far too quickly, and then spins its wheels doing absolutely nothing until the credits roll.
The one movie in this entire project I was hoping would prove me wrong, Pearl Harbor gets lost in its own self-importance. It sacrifices truth and respect for the dead for a Hollywood romance that nobody asked for. In forcing a love triangle between three characters that never existed, Pearl Harbor manufactures reasons for us to care, which is ridiculous given the harrowing story already staring it in the face. I honestly think time would be even less kind to this movie had it come out after 9/11.
- There You’ll Be – Faith Hill (2001)
The last music video Michael Bay ever directed, produced to promote Pearl Harbor and Faith Hill’s theme song for the movie. It’s not necessarily his worst, but it shares a lot of the same issues as the film. It puts Faith Hill in victory curls and has her perform the song in front of faded approximations of World War II iconography. Propaganda posters, vintage trucks, American flags, the works. It comes across about as phony as the film itself, until the final stretch where Bay finally just puts Hill in front of billowing curtains and a wind machine. He can shoot a video like that with his eyes closed, so for thirty seconds or so, it feels like vintage Bay. Just like the movie.
Bay’s original Transformers is by no means a bad film. But compared to the rest of the series and the action spectacles he already had under his belt by this point, Transformers is distressingly, painfully average. It has all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect from Bay as a popcorn filmmaker, as well as a collection of truly repellant main characters. The Linkin Park song, “What I’ve Done,” has gone on to become a meme in its own right, and is frankly the best part of the movie. Bay, unfortunately, did not direct the video for it, which seems like a missed opportunity.
Bay hooked up with Netflix for this one, and it’s got all the hallmarks of a failed Netflix franchise written all over it. The setup is simple enough, but beyond the film’s glorious opening car chase (that runs a solid twenty minutes), there’s just not enough to keep us engaged. Not even Ryan Reynolds at his smarmy Ryan Reynoldsiest can save the back half of this film from being just plain dull.
10) TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT (2017)
Ranking this behind Age of Extinction, because The Last Knight, while stylistically identical to Age of Extinction, has absolutely no intention of paying off anything that was set up in the previous film. That’s not the biggest problem, but it’s way up there. It’s also a structural mess, because while it’s a lot of fun seeing Anthony Hopkins fiddle-fart around with his robot pals, the actual save-the-world plot involving Mark Wahlberg lurches forward so slowly that it feels like the movie’s over with thirty minutes left. I really wish I liked The Last Knight more, because the fun parts are really fun, but there’s just not enough of them.
9) TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (2014)
I’ve seen people rank Trans4mers as the best Bay Transformers movie, which at first seemed crazy to me, but then I realize I’m ranking it as my second best, so what the hell do I know? We’re finally rid of the Witwicky clan, and the new team of Autobots assembled for this ride is genuinely fun (John Goodman’s Hound is the MVP here). It’s still far too long for its own good, and as cool as the Dinobots are, they don’t really make much of an impression. Stanley Tucci’s in this one, which bumps it up a few notches in my book.
The quintessential Michael Bay movie, with all of his best and worst tendencies on full display. It perfectly encapsulates everything going on in Hollywood in the late 90s: Bruce Willis and the peak of his stardom, a hugely entertaining supporting cast, a clunky marriage of modelwork and CGI, and a big jingoistic celebration of all things NASA. It’s also the movie that gave us one of Aerosmith’s worst songs, threaded into the movie in an attempt to nakedly chase the success of Jim Cameron’s Titanic. And speaking of Aerosmith…
- Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees) – Aerosmith (1997)
While Bay didn’t direct the music video for “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing,” he did direct the video for Aerosmith’s 1997 top 40 hit, “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)”. He fashioned it after the films of Terry Gilliam (12 Monkeys in particular), and added supermodels in dominatrix gear, because this is Michael Bay and Aerosmith we’re talking about here. This is somehow the only Aerosmith video he directed, which is a shame since it seems like a match made in heaven. Anyway, as sleazy as it is, this is a fun video, and emblematic of Bay’s work as a music video auteur. (More on that later.)
There was a time when I really thought this was Bay’s best movie, but with the benefit of some hindsight and a little bit of growing up, I’ve soured on this one considerably. The rise of the True Crime industry takes some of the fun out of this one, even as Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson give career-best performances. This movie finds Bay leaning into his macho fratboy persona, and if it had simply been an original story instead of a biopic about idiots committing murder, this would be a whole lot easier to enjoy.
6) TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (2011)
I have reservations about calling Dark of the Moon my favorite of Bay’s Transformers films, but it’s probably because I don’t truly like any of them. But if you’re deadset on watching any of them, this is the one. This is technically, stylistically the most accomplished of the series, with all its best and worst tendencies dialed all the way up to eleven. The action is lucid and clearly defined; the robots finally look like real characters and not nightmarish jumbles of moving machine parts; it’s fun hearing Leonard Nimoy play the villain. There’s a lot to appreciate about Dark of the Moon, up to and including its absolutely deranged spin on the history of the late 20th century. You don’t have to like it, but ya gotta respect it.
- “I Touch Myself” – Divinyls (1990)
This music video finds Michael Bay comfortably in his wheelhouse, one that we discussed in the intro to this series. The song is an irresistible earworm, and Bay manages to capture the allure of it without ever stooping into tastelessness. The video for “I Touch Myself” is a key transitional video from 80s MTV to 90s MTV, and while Michael Bay may not have been one of the most iconic directors of the music video era, his distinctly high-gloss style put a stamp on the visual language of 90s cinema..
Speaking of which, Bay came out of the gate swinging with his feature debut, a high-octane action comedy in the mold of Jerry Bruckheimer’s Beverly Hills Cop. The movie made stars out of sitcom favorites Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and put Bay on the map as an action director worth watching. The sweaty, orange-hued streets of Miami become a character unto themselves, and Bay famously enjoyed the experience so much he bought a home there. Again, it’s a perfect time capsule of its era, in all the best and worst ways. Bay still had something to prove, and he pulls it off admirably.
4) 13 HOURS: THE SECRET SOLDIERS OF BENGHAZI (2016)
13 Hours finds Michael Bay trying to make good on his failures with Pearl Harbor. By and large, he succeeded, telling the story of the 2012 Benghazi attack as matter-of-factly as humanly possible without veering too far into rah-rah jingoism or Call of Duty-style military porn. The raid itself is staged in waves, and is some of Bay’s best action filmmaking in over a decade. It’s visceral, heart-wrenching and surprisingly effective. The movie’s only true sin is that, like most of Bay’s features, it’s just too damn long.
Bay’s most recent film is easily one of his best, produced during the height of the COVID lockdown when most Hollywood productions were suspended. This allowed his crew to film some truly gnarly car chases through the streets of Los Angeles seemingly unhindered. I’m sure it wasn’t as easy as that, but he makes this all look so effortless. Jake Gyllenhaal is keyed in with a truly Looney Tunes performance, and the simple setup of a pair of bank robbers hijacking an ambulance to evade the cops provides plenty of latitude for escalating any number of tense situations. It’s a throwback to 90s action filmmaking at a time when we desperately need it.
Sean Connery’s iconic “prom queen” line from this film gets a shoutout in Ambulance, and it shows just how much things have changed in the 26 years between the two films. In the 90s Connery owned his role as one of the Last True Tough Guys, and pairing him up with Nicolas Cage, who at the time was still in his oddball critical darling phase, proved to be the perfect match for this mid-90s Die Hard-like. Actually shooting the film on location in Alcatraz adds a whole new dimension to the action, and Bay’s iconic high-gloss style gets set in stone here. It’s hard to beat The Rock, but Bay somehow found a way…
After the flogging he got for Pearl Harbor, Bay went back to the well for a sequel to his first big hit. Bad Boys II is everything audiences loved about the original and then some, reveling in its colossal poor taste from the opening scene. The film opens with Will Smith shooting up a Klan rally and ends with Martin Lawrence crashing a humvee into Guantanamo Bay, and in between all that Bay gives us three or four all-timer action setpieces. One of those sequences, the car chase on Miami’s MacArthur Causeway, wound up inspiring not only the climactic chase scene in Fast Five, but found its way into about half a dozen later Michael Bay movies.
Bad Boys II knows how ugly and outrageous it is, and the simple fact is that it just plain doesn’t care. You’re either ride or die with this movie, or you’re not. And I respect the hell outta that.
- “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” – Meat Loaf (1993)
We wrap up this series right back where we started: With a music video. Bad Boys II may be Michael Bay’s best feature film, but his his finest hour as a music video director has to be the 8-minute tour de force that is Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.
A song as big and bombastic as this needed an equally bombastic video, and Michael Bay stepped up and knocked that fucker right out of the park. Bay conveys the cheesy romanticism of Meat Loaf’s song with all the oversized grandeur of a Broadway production. Meat Loaf, done up in monster makeup sings his heart out in the dark, surrounded by candelabras and huge, billowing curtains as actress Dana Patrick wanders his gothic castle wearing skimpy white dresses. It’s silly, it’s overblown, and it’s completely, 100% earnest.
One thing I’ve learned through this series is that Michael Bay is at his best when he’s completely honest with himself and living his truth. Crazy car chases, tropical locales and the most beautiful people on earth being oversized caricatures of themselves. When those elements click, no one in the world can do what Michael Bay does. And one of these days he’s actually gonna make Robopocalypse. I believe it in my bones.
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