13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

After catching up on most of the Oscar flicks from the past year that I’d rather not have waited until DVD to see, 2016 begins with a military film. I’m not sure why – the records don’t bear it out – but it feels like this is exactly the sort of film with which I always begin my year, being a competently told but largely indistinguishable war film with a strongly personal focus bordering on hagiography. The real surprise, however, is that Michael Bay directed this one (about which, so much more later).

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tells the true (and largely apolitical) story of a team of CIA military contractors (including among them John Krasinski and James Badge Dale) who defied the orders of their Chief (David Costabile) to mount an aid-and-rescue mission to the besieged American embassy in Benghazi in September 2012.

First of all, as an action film 13 Hours is a big success. My primary goal as a moviegoer (a kind of Declaration of Principles at the top of the year, for those just tuning in) is to escape – escape from today and into a narrative, preferably with some degree of spectacle. This isn’t to say that I require spectacle – Spotlight is definitely on my hypothetical Best-Of list for last year – but the project of escapism helps if something blows up. And boy, do things blow up in 13 Hours. The action sequences here don’t so much allow you to escape reality as grab you by your lapels and thrust you into an intense combat situation. Pair with that the film’s sense of unrelenting tension, the anxious attitude that the worst is just about to materialize, and you have a film that is very difficult to stop watching. I don’t imagine, for the home video crowd, that there are many good spots to get a refill or take a bathroom break.

To say that 13 Hours is compelling stuff is not, however, to say that it’s a new classic. There’s nothing particularly innovative in it, nothing really memorable beyond the memory of being engaged in the moment. It doesn’t demand a second viewing, doesn’t invite a critical rethinking of one’s premises. It is, in the most earnest sense of the phrase, a popcorn film, albeit one which is not lazily made. It is actually quite well-made, cogently directed but with little on either end of the lazy/ambitious spectrum.

This, then, is the film’s greatest surprise – that 13 Hours was directed by Michael Bay. It’s remarkable to realize that 13 Hours contains very little of the excess that made such a mess of the Transformers franchise. There is little inappropriate comic relief; one recognizes, though, that the translator Amahl (Peyman Moaadi) is the kind of character that would be played by John Turturro, dialed up to eleven, and/or be the focal point of a thousand gross stereotypes if this were a Transformers movie. More agreeably, 13 Hours contains none of the leery sexuality of Transformers, by which I mean there are no young women in skimpy clothing bending over cars. 13 Hours is, however, as hypermasculine and rah-rah patriotic, though it’s presented less in the form of an advertisement and more built into the narrative itself. That is, the entire movie is “the army saves the day” rather than relegate that moment to merely a montage set to the music of AC/DC. It is, dare I say it, a more restrained and perhaps even mature Michael Bay film (which is, admittedly, a short putt).

It’s evident that Bay has a tremendous respect for the Armed Forces, though it borders on canonization in a few moments. We’ve seen a turn in war films toward an emphasis on individual heroism and away from sweeping historical narratives; there’s little of overt political content in the film, though a few beats of narrative readily politicized by pundits and politicians alike. Bay is more interested in the human element than the currents of history, though the scriptwriting is so on-the-nose that a repeated quotation from Joseph Campbell – explicitly mythologizing the “secret soldiers” and deifying them with the subtlety of a Mack truck – falls flat because of both how out-of-place it feels and how carelessly overt it is. While the direction of the film is more discreet than Bay has delivered of late, the hagiography isn’t. (One could imagine a cut of the film which eliminates the Campbell altogether, allowing the audience to intuit Bay’s point, and I’d have to say I’d have preferred this version. Show, don’t tell.)

Not an instant classic, not a groundbreaker, nor the political bombshell the 2016 candidates might have wanted, 13 Hours is competent enough and compelling enough that it makes for a fine diversion at the start of the year. It bodes well enough for Bay’s maturity as a filmmaker as, at the very least, a step in the right direction, but then again Transformers 5 is due next year. So much for that idea.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is rated R for “strong combat violence throughout, bloody images, and language.” The film is intensely violent, often graphically so, but comprised more of explosions and gunfire punctuated by moments of gore. There are a fair amount of F-words, though the context makes them seem less distasteful.

Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

The kindest thing I can say about Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction is that it reminded me very much of the fireworks show I saw on the Fourth of July this year.  In both cases, I attended out of a mix of curiosity, a mild sense of obligation, and a persistent feeling in the back of my mind that I was going to be disappointed.  And in both cases, I got exactly what I expected.

For that reason, I feel less inclined to berate Transformers: Age of Extinction than my readers might be expecting.  I knew precisely what to expect, and my expectations were pretty low, allowing me to take the fourth Transformers film for what it really is:  the cinematic equivalent of a fireworks show, all bombast and no bravura.  So I won’t even do the usual plot summary, because the plot can be summarized almost exclusively by naming actors and shouting onomatopoeias in all capital letters.

Fortunately, some very talented actors – Mark Wahlberg, Kelsey Grammer, and Stanley Tucci among them – are cashing what ought to have been very easy paychecks, and they’re more than capable of engaging an audience just on ethos alone.  They’re reliable and stable performers, and to be perfectly honest they, together with the budget, are what separate this film from a straight-to-DVD release.  It’s not particularly innovative, remaining in a very real sense indistinguishable from the three films that preceded it.  All one should expect from a Transformers film at this point is a series of very big, very loud, and slightly dumb explosions – which this Transformers delivers, and how.

At two hours and forty-five minutes, however, it’s absurdly long, baggy and bloated.  The words “There are too many robots” should not be an issue with a Transformers film, and yet there are far too many characters who come and go for reasons that can only be described as “plot.”  There are at least five factions of Transformers in the film, most of which are devoid of personality (and the ones with characterizations are viciously broad caricatures, like the samurai Transformer voiced by Ken Watanabe and the gun-toting Transformer voiced by John Goodman).  Only some of them are visually interesting – especially the dinosaur Transformers – but there’s little need for them in a film that very much resembles its main characters – lifeless, bulky, and clunky.

Sidebar:  one of my biggest cinematic pet peeves is when a film doesn’t properly introduce characters, such that I forget or never learn character names.  I think I can name about three Transformers in a cast of dozens.

Characterization aside, Transformers: Age of Extinction is a brutally tone-deaf feature, likely hard of hearing as a result of the amplified volume from the first three films.  The film barely has two settings – loud and very loud – and the pacing is astonishingly uneven while still managing to remain perfectly predictable.  There seem to be two distinct plots going on here – the American government’s pursuit of the Autobots and one corporation’s attempt to make their own Transformers – and either one of them would have made a decent enough film.  But since they’re thrown together into a film that is far more interested in explosions than in ideas, they’re reduced to what Mark Kermode has called “the loudest common denominator.”  Now, I realize that asking for ideas in a Transformers movie is like asking for a soufflé in a McDonalds, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the barest pretense of an idea.

What’s more, the film manages to be staggering insensitive, throwing around racial stereotypes to make the cast of Deadwood blush (for example, every Asian character is a master of some form of martial arts).  More patently offensive, Transformers boasts a neverending slew of quintessentially leery camera angles from Bay in which young women in tight/short clothing bend over things in slow-motion while the camera practically salivates over their lithe bodies.  It’s an eyeroll of the highest order to begin with, because Bay seems to be one of the only filmmakers outside of pornography not to realize that it’s the 21^st century and we’re all trying to be a bit more enlightened than that, but what makes it worse is that the film attempts to lecture us about sexualizing young women while doing exactly that.  There’s a loathsome moment where Wahlberg asks his daughter to dress more conservatively, which almost sounds like Bay reprimanding himself, but the camera is actually poised behind actress Nicola Peltz while apparently attempting to film directly up the leg of her shorts.

Aside from the perverse leering, aside from the casual racism, aside from the problems of pacing and length, and aside from the thin characterizations, every once in a while Transformers: Age of Extinction does manage to be a little bit of fun.  There are a few decent eyeball kicks, and Stanley Tucci is a real treat as always (it’s just too bad the film doesn’t actually know what to do with him).  But it is ultimately as mindless and as ephemeral as a fireworks show, but a good deal louder and very nearly unbearably longer.

Transformers: Age of Extinction is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language and brief innuendo.”  There are more robots punching robots and exploding than you could possibly imagine, and the film is replete with sexual objectification of female characters in tight clothing and accompanying light misogyny (“She looks hot”).  There’s one particularly well-timed F-bomb from Tucci and several other profanities of the scatological variety.