13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

13HoursPosterMichael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is the perfect storm of stereotypes, fear mongering and questionable politics in an overly stylized, testosterone-fueled, action thrill ride. Give Bay a little credit: hand him a real world war story that has become the subject of heated conspiracy theories and he’ll still find a way to pack it with explosions, unseemly blue lens flares and canted angles designed to make his beefed up soldiers look like Transformers.

Despite being called “13 Hours,” Bay’s film takes place in the few days prior to the September 11, 2012 attack on an American consulate in Libya. He follows six ex-Marines and Navy SEALs considered a secret security team stationed on a compound near the American ambassador’s consulate and how they took up the fight in the 13 hours of the attack.

All six soldiers are “alphas,” hulking bros who constantly flaunt their ego and all have incredible facial hair. We see them hauling monster truck tires with their shirts off or, despite being undercover, just looking boss in aviator sunglasses. One even has a tattoo of an open scar that shows he “bleeds” red, white and blue. Everyone who’s not an “alpha” just gets in the way, whether it’s their uptight, pencil pushing commanding officer, the windbag political diplomat or the CIA field agents with other priorities. They call them “tools” and “cockbags.” They tell one woman they need her eyes and ears, not her mouth. And they brag about “chubbing” one officer’s clothes, also known as rubbing their dicks on everything.

This first hour of flexing lays the groundwork for 90 minutes straight of chaotic firefights and explosions. The camera movement is violent and turbulent, the editing is frenetic, the action is impossible to track, and Bay still finds room for quippy jokes and tough guy clichés.

For a war movie, Clint Eastwood was able to deliver more visceral and coherent action in “American Sniper.” But “13 Hours” isn’t anything we haven’t already seen from Bay, if not a retread of visual motifs across all his films. He remains obsessed with slow-motion explosions and shooting domineering low angles that gives everything badass proportions. Even the quieter moments are filled with chatter and the camera unable to hold focus on just one thing at a time. Bay has no interest in simmering tension, only action.

This is all harmless fun in a mindless “Transformers” movie, but in a film about Benghazi, Bay’s apolitical treatment of the material teeters from indifferent to irresponsible. “13 Hours” doesn’t concern itself with conspiracy theories, but little Easter eggs are scattered throughout, like a vague memo suggesting there could be an attack, or one agent commenting, “Does it seem like everybody knows what’s going on here but us?” They play like after thought teasers for a more sinister government cover-up.

Movies have long gotten away with making Nazis and zombies plausible villains in whatever situation you stick them in, but Bay may have finally elevated another figure into that canon: shifty-eyed terrorists. “American Sniper” didn’t score any points with the Muslim community, but although Bay has some Arabs playing for the home team, he’s far worse in suggesting that “it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad.” And don’t forget the shot of terrorists blasting AK-47 bullet holes into an American flag!

The incredible body count the six soldiers amass is mostly bloodless, but once an American goes down Bay holds nothing back. He can truly milk a death for all its worth, and in the same way that “American Sniper” brought out the military colors in its closing moments, “13 Hours” to its credit drops the machismo and manages a gut-wrenching finale.

But Bay isn’t fooling anyone that he’s really more interested in explosions than anything. There’s no conspiracy here.

1 ½ stars

Revisited: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” one of the worst movies ever made? I play fair and revisit it.

 

Recently, a fellow blogger started a blogathon and posed a challenge: write a bad review of a good movie or a good review of a bad movie.

To be mean to something good is more commonly known as trolling, which isn’t difficult at all. To write something good about a bad movie on the other hand did not mean to lie, but to play fair. If I was going to do so, I thought how great it would be to pick something not just bad, but monumentally awful. And if I picked the worst movie I’d ever seen, what could be a greater challenge?

So, with that said, is “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” the worst movie I’ve ever seen?

I used to think so. More than many other film experiences, seeing the second “Transformers” was a watershed moment for me as a critic. Rarely had I seen a film that had such a strong disconnect between critics and fans, a 35 on Metacritic and yet $400 million domestically at the box office, the second highest of 2009. I had arguments with friends and family and got in trouble at work for ranting. I began using the expression “action extravaganza” liberally to describe it, a term I borrowed from a video game critic who used it to describe games like “Call of Duty” that were so intense and heavy handed in gritty, modern warfare that people foamed at the mouth.

Roger Ebert famously wrote that the film was so bloated that film classes would look back on it fondly as the end of an era, but hindsight has shown that CGI heavy blockbusters such as this have not disappeared.

Skids and Mudflap Transformers 2

In fact, the third movie, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” is possibly as bad, if not worse, despite a mild uptick in reviews. The plot became more convoluted, it takes more liberties with historical moments and landmarks, it turns Sam Witwicky (Shia Labeouf) into an egotistical prick, the fight scenes got even louder and bigger, and it even adds four minutes to its run time.

The only distinct difference is the lack of “ROTF”’s embarrassingly racist robot twins, two souped-up spitfires who slung hip hop epithets, fought constantly and could not read. But “DOTM” includes everything but the “black” robot, resorting to British and white-trash stereotypes instead.

“Revenge of the Fallen” has the place in history because it surprised us all. The action blockbusters of the 2000s seemed to grow to this point, a film that really was louder, busier and heavier than any that had come before. Only the previous year with “The Dark Knight,” it had felt as though the comic book genre really could be grandiose and brilliant at the same time, but “Transformers” sent the genre the other way in titanic fashion. Continue reading “Revisited: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is a mind-numbing, relentless, annoying, incoherent, bloated and overall poorly made film that only surpasses the abominable first sequel to this franchise possibly for the reason that it is less racist. This series’ enduring popularity is evidence that the blockbuster crowd has become no less robotic and drone like than the monstrosities on screen.

Michael Bay’s second “Transformers” film, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” left me immensely angry, with myself for having sat through it, with so many others for having enjoyed it and with Bay for having ever made it. I had never seen a film as long or as overstuffed, and it earned a place in bad movie history since.

Now here we are two years later. “Dark of the Moon” was not enraging but depressing in its repetition of the same scatterbrained sense of humor, inconceivable plot, cinematography that blatantly defied cinematic staples and worst of all, tedious, unmemorable, bombastic and endlessly long battle sequences. Continue reading “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Anyone who knows me knows I had severe doubts about “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” before going in, and despite my enjoyment of the first film, this one has Michael Bay to thank for that. But I checked my bias at the door and yet my first suspicion this would be a bad film was the Paramount logo. Sound effects punctuated every star that flew by (all 22), and I asked, “Is this really necessary?”

That’s the question I was asking throughout the whole movie. How much longer does this fight scene between hundreds of CGI creations have to drag on for? And how many more of them do we need? How many back stories and Macguffins do we need to understand that an evil alien race wants to destroy Earth purely for revenge (which, since it’s in the title, is fairly obvious already)? Why must it pander every stereotype, cliché and sex joke in the book before it thinks we’re entertained? Continue reading “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”