Every great movie Michael Bay almost ruined by directing it: “I would’ve never done a better job”
Perhaps the strangest thing about Michael Bay, whose name has become a byword for Hollywood excess and the sort of mindless, effects-obsessed blockbusters that irritate the old guard, is that he isn’t a bad director by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, most of his filmography is comprised of bombastic action flicks that pay almost no attention to such trivialities as plot and character, but it’s impossible to say the man doesn’t know how to compose a frame. By the definition of the term, Bay is most certainly an auteur, but he’s also the industry’s most oxymoronic example.
The term is usually associated with filmmakers who possess such a unique and distinctive style that viewers are immediately able to tell who’s behind the camera from a single shot or scene, with their work defined by individuality and a desire to achieve on-camera feats that nobody else has dreamed up.
By that logic, Bay is absolutely an auteur. Unfortunately, instead of putting his visual flair to better use, he’s happy to knock out a string of poorly-received and mind-numbing features that are awash with product placement, closeups of rippling biceps and jiggling arses, and, of course, his signature ‘Bayhem’.
He’s been doing it for 30 years, and there’s no chance he’ll change his stripes. It’s stating the obvious to say that Michael Bay only knows how to make Michael Bay movies, with audiences dodging several bullets over the years when he either didn’t get or was turned down for films that would have been exponentially worse if he’d directed them.
While speaking to Collider, Bay revealed that before he made his feature-length debut on Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys, “the first movie I was going for with a vengeance was Speed,” one of the greatest action films ever made. “I lost that movie, OK? Jan de Bont did a great job.” Would he have done a better one? Nope, seeing as he hasn’t made anything anywhere near as good.
When he turned his attentions to the war genre, the world was given Pearl Harbor, for better or worse. It made a lot of money at the box office, and its standout set piece remains impressive a quarter of a century later, but it was his third time lucky in depicting conflict on the big screen after he turned down Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, eventually made by Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott.
The former is one of the best war movies of all time that won five Academy Awards, and while the latter was nowhere near as successful on the critical or commercial front, it still won two Oscars and plenty of acclaim for its boots-on-the-ground approach and focus on immersion and authenticity.
At least he’s smart enough to realise it, though, with Bay admitting that he “would’ve never done a better job” on Saving Private Ryan than Spielberg. As for Black Hawk Down? “I am so glad Ridley Scott did that movie.” It wasn’t just epic-sized pictures either, with the Transformers veteran once circling Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth.
The claustrophobic thriller worked because it was a contained, confined, and intimate genre piece, helped by a still relatively unknown Colin Farrell disappearing into the character of Stu Shepard. In February 2000, it was announced that Will Smith was circling the lead role with Bay eying the director’s chair, which would have guaranteed a much bigger, and decidedly less effective, version of Phone Booth.
Maybe one day Bay will helm his masterpiece, apologies to any diehard supporters of The Rock, Armageddon, or Transformers: Age of Extinction, but all of the movies mentioned above were significantly better off without him.
Every great movie Michael Bay almost ruined by directing it:
- Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994)
- Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
- Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001)
- Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002)
