Every Michael Bay Movie Ranked Worst To Best

Most Michael Bay movies are devoid of quiet moments exploring essential human experiences like love, loss, and longing, and Pearl Harbor might well be the strongest possible case for why the director shouldn't even try. An attempt to match the emotional resonance and epic sweep of James Cameron's Titanic with a story of a romance in the midst of crisis, Bay's Pearl Harbor is a three-hour viewing experience that can only be described as punishing. At least with the Transformers movies, you're encouraged to turn off your mind and let the explosions and crunching metal steamroll over you. Pearl Harbor, to its eternal detriment, wants to be taken seriously.

The movie's runtime is dominated by a tone-deaf love triangle between characters as magnetic as a kitchen sponge, making the actual invasion sequence a relative afterthought. There are no character arcs in this movie. No one grows, no one learns—our heroes simply flail around until the bombs fall. Bay's other movies may have lower lows, but the sheer audacity of this movie borders on violence against the viewer. Both historically inaccurate and fictionally inert, there is no value to Pearl Harbor. It does not deserve to live in infamy. It doesn't deserve anything at all.

The first Texas-style Transformers movie introduces Mark Wahlberg in the lead role and loosely continues the storyline set up by the Sam Witwicky trilogy, with Wahlberg as a scrappy inventor who comes across Optimus Prime during a time when the government is working to expel all Transformers from the planet. It's a weirdly more grown-up version of the story, with Wahlberg's performance playing a put-upon dad serving as a positive contrast to Shia "Optimus!!!" LeBeouf.

The human element in general is much stronger here than in previous films. Watching Mark Wahlberg and company try to survive in the midst of battle is fun, even if it's still impossible to tell what's going on, what the stakes are, where people are within the conflict—you know, all the essential elements that give an action scene its power. There's a cool sequence of the Autobots attacking a government science lab in a heel turn, and a neat self-regenerating robot for an enemy. If it ended after 90 minutes, it'd be the best one in the series. But it just...keeps...going.

Extra aggravating for viewers are the obvious ways Age of Extinction went all-in on pandering to Chinese audiences, sacrificing story and plot logic for the sake of some fat stacks of yuan. Additionally, the much-ballyhooed dinosaur Transformers are a major league nonentity—unexciting and unintelligent robots who apparently don't bother with disguise at all.

The third Transformers movie is elevated by an inspired opening sequence on the moon, a charismatic voiceover performance by the late Leonard Nimoy that adds a little gravitas to the whole thing, and action sequences that incorporate the human characters in exciting ways. Where the other movies have tended to sideline their human heroes as helpless bystanders once the action starts, this one gets them thoroughly in the mix in a way that works, with perhaps the best example being a legitimately cool wingsuit rescue sequence in a collapsing building during the final battle in Chicago. 

While this movie is still far too long, clocking in at over two-and-a-half hours, the sting is lessened by the fact that everything is a step up from its horrid predecessor. Amazingly, some of the jokes even work! Perhaps most surprising of all, instead of making the robot characters either completely indistinguishable from each other or offensive caricatures, they finally have personality.

It's hard to extract this movie from the political quarrel that surrounded it. Bay certainly doesn't try to: he makes his stance clear, and uses the movie as a cudgel with which to criticize the U.S. government in some far-from-subtle ways. Which is all fair—it just would've been a lot better if the actual movie had been better. Bay paints his "secret soldier" heroes with the broadest possible brush, giving viewers little to latch onto for dramatic purposes. It gets to the point where it's hard to tell how this movie is supposed to entertain.

Even without what some may find to be irksome messaging, this is just not a great action movie, with thin characters, confusing nocturnal shootout sequences where it's hard to tell who is where, a poorly-defined enemy, and—in classic Bay fashion—an interminable runtime. Word of advice: if you want to see a great movie about a makeshift group of heroes defending their base against an overwhelming siege, watch the lean, mean Assault on Precinct 13.

In 2020 Hollywood, intellectual property is king. From Batman to Jumanji to — why not — another Robin Hood, movie financiers tend to put their money toward projects with name recognition — even if nobody in the real world asked for them. So credit where it's due for 6 Underground, a small-scale, original concept action movie made expressly for Netflix. 

Written by the guys behind the Zombieland and Deadpool movies, 6 Underground is an aspiring franchise starter. Led by Ryan Reynolds, the movie follows a swaggering crew of sexy vigilantes as they roam the globe driving fast cars, blowing stuff up, and doing parkour, making it all look effortless while flexing, cursing, and joking around. 

And you know what? It's pretty solid. Bay's bombastic style is well-suited to the over-the-top material, adding zip and verve to sequences that otherwise wouldn't have any dramatic tension whatsoever. (Who's chasing who? The bad guys want what? Who cares?!) The plot is unimportant, especially relative to the group dynamic, which always retains a sense of anarchic fun — especially when Ryan Reynolds is onscreen, commanding attention with show-stealing charisma.

6 Underground is a loud, long, exhausting movie, and one critics had little patience for. But if you can give yourself over to its simple pleasures, you'll find a generally entertaining, sporadically inspired movie to watch in the background on a Sunday afternoon. 

If nothing else, it's the kind of movie to watch with your dad. He's probably gonna love it — and you might be surprised.

Armed with a better plot and a thousand percent more swagger than its predecessor, Bad Boys II is almost the Platonic ideal of a shoot-'em-up action blockbuster (though once again, Bay can't stop himself from indulging in a fat dose of gay panic—it isn't funny). The perfect summary of the movie's mission statement is right there in the opening scene, in which we witness the arrival of the bad boys at a white supremacist rally, popping out in full police gear with guns akimbo from underneath some KKK robes to bring the absolute pain to an unlucky group of outlaw racists. 

From the beginning to the end, Bad Boys II is about the two most badass police officers in the world in the most insane situations that have ever existed—nothing more, nothing less. Despite its abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score, this movie works because Bay is at his absolute best when he truly embraces the stupid—and it doesn't get much stupider (in a good way) than Will Smith sending a car into a drift spin while firing a machine gun into a crowd of enemies. And how could we not mention the insane ending sequence when the bad boys invade Cuba? Because they do that. They literally invade Cuba, and it's the best thing ever. Sorry, critics. We don't know what you were watching, but this movie rules.

Based on an insane true story about a group of 'roided-out Miami knuckleheads who murdered and defrauded their way to temporary fortune, Pain & Gain is a madcap, dark examination of the American dream corrupted—and if you have an appropriately dark sense of humor, it's pretty funny, too. (One highlight, while Dwayne Johnson's character is disposing of human limbs by cooking them on a barbecue grill, is the message "THIS IS STILL A TRUE STORY" sliding cheekily across the screen.) 

While a lot of the jokes don't quite land, this is still Bay's funniest movie, if only for the way its tragic central characters doom themselves by flying bullheadedly straight into the sun. In its look at American capitalistic excess, it's like a Michael Bay take on Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street—the mania of the story is infectious to the audience, even as the characters become more and more unforgivable. 

Underrated and under-appreciated, Pain & Gain is Bay on a small scale, making a movie that feels somehow personal. It has more heart and inspiration in its relatively brief runtime—only two hours!—than the Transformers movies have in their entirety. Is it for everybody? No. But for a filmmaker who always seems to be spread himself thin trying to please everybody, that's a good thing.