Michael Bay's Good, Bad and Ugly!

[Gabriel Girard]

''You haven't seen Bad Boys 2?''

[Mach6]

Good: The Rock The only Bay movie I freakin love & can watch a million times without feeling any shame. Back in the days when Nicholas Cage gave a damn & wasn’t a parody of himself. Also, Sean Connery’s last great badass performance.

Bad: The Island I’ll argue that this is Bay’s best looking film & I love the insanity of how the big chase scene started with dropping “dumbbell” wheels to smash up cars to dangling off big letters from a massive skyscraper. I liked the cast (Buscemi always steals every scene he’s in) & the smart old school, sci-fi story. It has the same problems that Bay’s ugly films have. It’s way too long & has obnoxious product placement (X-Box anybody?).

Ugly: (Tie) Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys 2, Armageddon, Transformers 2, & Transformers 3.

Michael McVey’s So Bad It’s Good Pick: None

I don’t mind stupid action movies. I proudly have both Expendables, Rambo, Faster, Death Race & several others in my DVD/Blu Ray collection. The problems with Bay’s stupid action movies are they’re all at least 45 minutes too long (can you imagine how tiresome a two and a half hour Expendables movie would be), the homophobic/racist stereotypes, product placement overkill even by Casino Royale’s standards, & Bay’s horrible sense of humor.
I agree that Bay should get away from the Transformers franchise because these $150+million budgeted blockbusters bring out his worst tendencies. I’m hoping Pain and Gain’s modest $20-$25 million dollar budget will keep it to a reasonable 80-100 minutes running time.

[mavrach]

Almost every one of Bay's movies has a needless subplot you could cut out to streamline the movie.

Like I said on the podcast, if I'm in the mood for some dumb fun, I won't go for a 2 and a half hour movie. This is why Commando gets so many viewings from me, it's only 90 minutes.