13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

This is Dwight's worst prank ever

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Grade: C +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, Pablo Schreiber, David Denman, Dominic Fumusa and Max Martini

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 24 min.

There’s adequate blame to go around over the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Much lies with U.S. government officials who didn’t adequately appreciate threats of violence or repair security lapses that might have prevented the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, in Libya on the evening of September 11, 2012. There are also the politicians and pundits who, for the sake of scoring cheap political points, have eschewed sober assessment for costly grandstanding, appropriating these same solemn deaths into a hashtag.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi lies somewhere between Benghazi and #Benghazi. Director Michael Bay, a renowned action filmmaker with avowed conservative politics, is both an obvious and dubious choice to shepherd this story to the silver screen. At a protracted 2-hour 24-minute running time, 13 Hours takes its political potshots, some provocative others specious—the notion that six CIA contractors caught in the crosshairs of a nocturnal firefight to the death received real-time reports from back home, saying State Department officials were blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video, doesn’t comport with reality or common sense.

Those going to see 13 Hours to rekindle their political fervor miss the film’s only virtue. Bay breaths life into the catchphrase, elucidating a time and place account of the nighttime assaults on an American diplomatic compound and, later, a CIA annex one mile away. The film lionizes the CIA soldiers who executed a daring rescue mission into the diplomatic compound, then fought back armed insurgents at their annex throughout the night against overwhelming odds. It indicts bureaucratic missteps. It captures a surreal world where it’s impossible to differentiate friend from foe, while paying respect to armed Libyans who came to aid of the besieged Americans.

The action scenes are riveting and astutely frame. Bay revels in military rhythms, from its vernacular to the resonance of distinctive armaments. He also pierces the fog of war so the audience can comprehend even the most chaotic circumstances. But this being a Michael Bay film, character development is overrun by spectacle, a regrettable lapse in a film of this sort. CIA contractor Jack Silva, played by John Krasinski, is the only semi-fleshed out character. The rest are archetypes with nicknames, from strapped paramilitary men with their tatts and AKs, to sniveling pencilpushers in distress. There’s little nuance navigating of the shades of gray in American interventionism and diplomacy. Heck, the purpose of the CIA operatives in Benghazi is never clarified (perhaps intentional on Bay’s part).

This is the third straight year the Martin Luther King holiday weekend has seen the wide release a military-centric, jingoistic film, after American Sniper in 2015 and Lone Survivor in 2014. 13 Hours figures to generate boffo box-office returns. Unfortunately, many in the crowd will be there to affirm rather than learn.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Cowa-Bungle

Grade: D +

Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Starring: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner and Whoopi Goldberg

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 minutes

For all the promises of a new and improved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), this Michael Bay-produced reboot is an exercise is generic, industrial line sameness. The budget is clearly bigger, but precious little of it was allocated to competent screenwriting. Or acting coaches.

The film is officially directed by Jonathan Liebesman, but if you played the Michael Bay drinking game and downed a shot for every windblown, zoom-in closeup, you’d be drunk inside the opening 10 minutes. Then imagine a Transformers movie where all the Transformers are Wheelie/Skids and, well, turtle-bots.

The contrivances start early, when the little girl who once rescued four genetically-altered turtles from a burning lab just happens to become April O’Neil (Megan Fox), the adult TV reporter who eventually stumbles across the quartet of talking, crime-fighting reptiles and their man-sized rat sensei, Splinter.

The secret, sewer-dwelling turtles—Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello—are busy protecting New York City from the dastardly Foot Clan and its leader, Shredder. Shredder wears a multi-bladed suit of armor and is the sort of villain who says things like, “Tonight, I will dine on turtle soup,” and “Activate the toxin release procedure.”

Ah, of course there’s always some toxin or mutagen or cellular alteration. And the grand plan of Shredder and nefarious industrialist William Fichtner … er, Eric Sachs (William Fichtner) is to release a deadly gas kept inside their skyscraper's spire, then clean up selling the antidote derived from the Ninja Turtles’ mutated blood. However, the baddies didn’t even know the TMNTs were alive until mere hours before turtle-napping them and revealing this plan, so when exactly did they assemble and erect this gas-filled spire? Was the poisonous gas always there, and if so, why didn’t the Foot Clan release it long ago before the TMNTs arrived instead of spending years committing petty street crimes? Or was it always an early investment in a get-rich-quick scheme just waiting for the right catalyst?

The rest of TMNT is a series of interchangeable set pieces and head-spinning visual effects, all punctuated by bad puns and faux-seriousness. And if by film’s end you have a sudden urge to scarf down pizza from a prominently-placed chain, well, that’s no accident either.

The motion-capture process used to render the turtles is quite striking. But to what purpose? "Cowabunga?" More like Cowa-bungle.

White House Down

Redrum...REDRUM!

Grade: C +

Director: Roland Emmerich

Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods, Jason Clarke, Richard Jenkins, and Joey King

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 11 min.

The rank similarities between White House Down and the Olympus Has Fallen, just released three months ago to tepid reaction, are obvious and regrettable. Both involve terrorist assaults on the presidential residence, kidnapping the Commander in Chief, a turncoat Secret Service agent, attempts to co-opt the nuclear launch codes, and so on.

But White House Down (and Olympus, for that matter) is more like White House Die Hard in more ways than I reasonably have space to delineate. And, that action apogee is only the most overt blueprint for a cheeky thriller that threatens to actual entertain before overstaying its welcome. Along with John McTiernan, director Roland Emmerich also apes Wolfgang Petersen (Air Force One), Michael Bay (The Rock) and Season 7 of 24, not to mention a not-so-casual mention of Emmerich’s own Independence Day—actually, this is now the fourth film in which the German-born director has wrecked the White House. Discuss...

This time around, Capitol cop John Cale (Channing Tatum) is a decorated war hero with a messy personal life hoping to land a job on the President’s Secret Service detail, headed by the retiring Martin Walker (James Woods, his casting alone an obvious bit of foreshadowing). After an unsuccessful interview with old flame (or something) Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), Cale his precocious daughter Emily (Joey King) get caught mid-tour in an armed takeover of the White House by a band of paramilitary mercenaries aimed at kidnapping President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx). Of course, it falls to Cale to save the president...the country...the world!

After touring the White House last year, I actually found myself marveling at the meticulous set design. But, it’s the affable byplay between Tatum and Foxx carries the film, which works best when it’s not taking itself too seriously—a car chase around the White House lawn involving the presidential limo is the over-the-top highpoint. Sawyer chomping nervously on some Nicorette gum is a not-so-subtle allusion to President Obama’s cigarette habit. Still, it’s a bit uneasy when the notion of character development is an African-American president gravitating to high-end sneakers, an automatic rifle and a Cadi when things get real—”Get your hands off my Jordans!”, Sawyer yelps at a tenacious terrorist.

Ultimately, one (or a half-dozen) too many implausible and hackneyed twists eventually bring the story an inevitable, wearisome end. The 137-minute running time is at least a half-hour too long, stacking on plot turns that aren’t logical or necessary. Among the bloat are a bevy of supporting characters that do little besides stand around looking inert or saying inept things. And once the gleeful goofiness dissipates, that more than anything brings White House Down down.

Pain & Gain

SPF 20K

Grade: B -

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Ed Harris, Rebel Wilson, Tony Shalhoub and Ken Jeong

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 10 min.

Was Michael Bay’s vision of American society actually its mirror image all along? Looking back, is it mere coincidence that in 1995 when Bay released Bad Boys, his first garish big-budget behemoth, about two Miami cowboy cops, the real-life Sun Gym Gang was in the throes of its brutal spree of kidnapping, torture, extortion and ultimately murder across South Florida? Is it coincidence that Pain & Gain, Bay’s latest feature 18 years hence, comes full circle geographically and, in some ways, thematically? [Between this and Spring Breakers, it hasn’t been a good month at the movies for The Florida Commission on Tourism.]

It is difficult to give Bay too much credit for seeing the story of Daniel Lugo and his band of muscle-bound murderers for what it is: an embodiment of the American dream on steroids. Based on a 1999 series of Miami New Times articles by writer Pete Collins, it’s set a modern-day milieu where everything is supersized, from abs to ambitions, from bodybuilding to Benjamins. Intent notwithstanding, Bay’s bombastic camerawork, slow-mo montages and oversaturated palette are the oddly apt canvas for a tale that even the director of Armageddon needs to continuously remind the audience is based on a true story.

In world divided between “doers” and “don’t-ers,” Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) fancies himself among the fittest former. A mix of moxie and make-believe, he ranks Rocky, Scarface and Michael Corleone among his personal heroes. And, his motivation is worthy of admiration, as when he exponentially increases membership at the Miami-based Sun Gym where he works as a take-no-prisoners fitness trainer.

One of his clients is Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), an unctuous businessman with an ego as massive as his bank account. Spotting an easy and deserving mark, Lugo enlists his hapless workout buddy Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson, ever-improving), a hulking ex-con and born-again-Christian. Together they hatch a plan to kidnap and coerce Kershaw into signing over his fortune—money, cars, residence, etc.—to the trio. Lugo dreams of a life of mansions, backyard barbeques and riding lawnmowers; Doorbal wants to purchase injections to reanimate his steroid-shriveled testicles; Doyle, well, is a timid Lenny who finds wealth far more problematic than poverty.

Bay’s impulse to portray the Gang as bumbling beefcakes rather than monstrous meatheads works—to a point. There’s merit to lampooning the inanity of Kershaw’s month-long captivity and would-be murder, followed by the need for Kershaw to enlist the services of private investigator Ed Du Bois (Ed Harris) after the Miami police refuses to assign credence to Kershaw’s unbelievable tale. But torture, dismemberment and homicide—both attempted and actual—merit far greater reproach than what’s typically reserved for the Keystone Cops. Pain & Gain’s comedy is pitch black, but it remains comedic nonetheless even at moments when a more agile director would recognize the need to modulate tone and deconstruct characters. Instead, Bay chooses odds ways to pull his punches, like couching any of the actual murders by the Gang as accidental.

But modulation is hardly Bay’s hallmark, and here is no exception. Dissatisfied with the satirical, Bay again indulges in the scatalogical, epitomized by an inexplicable scene in which a fat, incontinent patient leaves bile smeared all over the walls and floor of his hospital bathroom. In a story whose truth is already stranger than fiction, one character feeds his severed toe to a pet chiwawa. And in what universe does a gaggle of married male suburbanites, with their wives looking on, breathlessly volunteer to role-play a rapist attacking Doyle’s stripper girlfriend (Mindy Robinson) during an upscale Community Watch meeting? Misogyny? Check. Homophobia? Check.

In truth, Pain & Gain is a setting that cries out for Michael Bay’s filmmaking technique, but it’s a story that demands the satirical tone of the Coen brothers. Lugo may as well have been talking about Bay when he declares, “Some people don’t know a good thing when it’s staring them in the face.”

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Somebody say they needed 1.21 gigawatts?

Grade: D +

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

The greatest trick Michael Bay ever pulled was making his last Transformers movie so godawful that virtually any follow-up would look superlative by comparison. While Bay excises most (but not all) of the hip-hop “humor” that sullied Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, he amps up the decibels and bumptiousness for Transformers: Dark of the Moon (hereafter Transformers 3).

As the film opens, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and the Autobots roam the planet as a phalanx for American foreign policy – we watch them destroy an “illegal nuclear facility” in some nameless Arab country. Meanwhile, Decepticon leader Megatron (Hugh Weaving) has been reduced to a desert-dwelling raghead patiently plotting his next terrorist incursion.

Opportunity comes in the form a Cybertronian ship whose crash landing on the moon in the early 1960s was the actual impetus for the U.S.-Soviet space race (this historical tie-in includes a shuffle-through by Buzz Aldrin himself). Found aboard the craft are a collection of gizmos designed to teleport Cybertron into Earth’s orbit (we never really know why) together with the dormant hulk of former Autobot leader Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy’s inclusion provides the film’s lone moment of cleverness when a couple of slacker bots watch the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek TV series and, in a bit of foreshadowing, describe it as “the one where Spock goes crazy.”

Once again the Decepticons and their allies threaten mankind while political leaders opt for appeasement, exiling the Autobots and removing their soldiers from the battlefield in hopes that the enemy will just leave them alone. Instead, the Decepticons launch an offensive to secure world domination, headlined by a rampage through downtown Chicago that does more damage to the Windy City than Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Transformers 3 shamelessly assimilates the vernacular and imagery of Sept. 11 (Chi-town is “Ground Zero”), refracted through Bay’s interpretation of the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, Holocaust, and Neville Chamberlain. And if toppled skyscrapers aren’t discomforting enough, inexplicable recurring hero Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) discovers the Decepticons are out to steal your women, too. As Sam’s new girlfriend Carly, ex-Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley (subbing for the suddenly sage Megan Fox) primarily sports tight jeans and purses her pursed, collagen-filled lips while standing in front of a green-screen full of explosions and other assorted carnage.

Bay’s literal and figurative flag-waving would be fine if his film was any good. The Bush Doctrine overtones in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are suitable because they’re packaged in first-rate vehicles. By contrast, Transformers 3 an orgy of dizzying, interminable special effects and right-wing allegory set to Wagneresque blaring brass of composer Steve Jablonsky. You pray for periodic flashes of color in order to tell one shape-shifting robot from another – at one point, four indistinguishable silver robots are caught in a Mexican standoff. Bay’s tone-deaf notion of humor is Sam’s mom taking time during the End of Days to chat with her adult son about how to satisfy a woman.

The rest of the window-dressing is equally vapid and useless. Save for Carly's collaboration with Bay’s leering camera, there’s not a single supporting character whose presence would be missed, but there are a whole lot of actors that should know better. They include a gonzo corporate exec (John Malkovich), a NSA ramrod (Frances McDormand), McDreamy as a car collector (Patrick Dempsey), a crazy Asian (Ken Jeong, natch), a conspiracy nut (John Turturro, again), and invincible super soldiers Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson.

In Bay’s reality, Bill O’Reilly passes for a celebrity cameo and a medal awarded by President Obama for saving the world isn’t enough to get Sam a job as a mail room clerk. “We’re pretty much all Republicans around here,” quips one company headhunter, channeling his director and his loud, jingoistic polemic for neo-con U.S. geopolitics. Transformers 3: Mission not accomplished.

Neil Morris

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Slow down - we have to keep this up for
another 149 minutes

Grade: D

Director: Michael Bay

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, and Ramon Rodriguez

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

To quote Team America: World Police (and shouldn’t we all?), “Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?” It is little surprise that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is as visually bleary and bombastic as Bay’s lucrative, aesthetically-reprehensible forerunner. Or that the plotline grafted together by usual suspects Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci is as mind-numbing as it is derivative. Or that Bay’s robotic approximation of women are as panting sexpots while African-Americans are jive-talkin’, gold tooth sportin' illiterates – “We don’t really do much reading,” admits Autobot Mudflap (voiced by white actor Tom Kenney) when asked to translate some ancient Transformer hieroglyphics. Or that Bay’s inferiority-fueled self-aggrandizement again rears its pathetic head: Following his passing homage to Armageddon during the last Transformers, the sequel features a Bad Boys poster plastered on the wall of a college dorm room and Bay revisiting Pearl Harbor when Decepticons demolish the U.S. Pacific fleet.

What is notable is that it only took almost 160 days for the first anti-Obama movie to snake its way into theaters. In the midst of an ongoing mission to root out and destroy Decepticons (codenamed NEST), a new National Security advisor and presidential liaison (John Benjamin Hickey) steps brashly onto the scene, aiming to dismantle the Autobot-human cooperation agreement – with the blessing of the new president, he continuously reminds us – under the foolhardy notion that if the U.S. military, er, Autobots simply left the Middle East, er, Earth, then Al-Qaeda, er, Decepticons would stand down and leave us in peace. And, if that 2x4 metaphor doesn’t smack you in the head hard enough, Bay makes sure that, during coverage of a Decepticon offensive, a CNN television reporter conspicuously mentions that “President Obama” was being taken to an undisclosed location, and later, images of Obama are interspersed throughout a Decepticon terrorist video played over hijacked television airwaves.

It is no wonder, then, that the film’s climactic donnybrook is fought in the middle of Egypt, or that the only Arab country to come to the aid of American soldiers are the Jordanians. Still, even if Bay’s conception of geopolitics and U.S. foreign policy is as shallow as Megan Fox’s Daisy Dukes, all would be forgiven if he had the dexterity to finally rise to the occasion and put some talent where his money is.

A college-age Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and main squeeze Mikaela (Fox, seen mostly running in slow motion wearing a halter top) again find themselves in the middle of a war for universal supremacy between the Transformers, including a resurrected Megatron (Hugh Weaving) and his master, The Fallen (Tony Todd). Megatron’s mission is to track down some hidden power thingamabob that the Fallen will use to revive a machine used to destroy the Sun, while also killing Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), since only a Prime can vanquish the Fallen.

Frankly, I have seen backstories to Mario series video games with more depth than this storyline – indeed, sitting through Transformers is like watching a 150-minute long arcade game. Any serious attempt to decipher the pointless plotline, with its pilfered elements from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings, is stymied by a nonstop hail of gunfire and other assorted weaponry that riddles every scene. It’s not enough to suffer the constant barrage of shape-shifting robots veering wildly across the screen; Bay throws in helicopters, cargo carriers, fighter jets, motorcycles, battleships, submarines, tanks, amphibious assault vehicles, and an unmanned aerial drone in a pear tree.

In order to stave off mental atrophy, I allowed my thoughts to wander, considering how – in a haphazard attempt to incorporate LaBeouf’s real-life hand injury – Sam manages to locate and dress himself with gauze and finger splints seconds after being violently teleported into the Sahara desert. Sadly, I wasn’t able to miss the juvenile yuks from two instances of dogs humping each other, which mirrors a later scene in which a miniature Transformer humps Fox’s leg.

Bay’s schoolyard notion of masculinity is epitomized by his steroid-infused filmmaking style. Perhaps it also accounts for why Mikaela’s chosen insult for Sam is to repeatedly call him “such a girl,” or why Bay expresses on odd predilection for testicles: First, Mikaela’s lands atop the gonads of Sam’s roommate (Ramon Rodriguez), then an ex-government agent (John Turturro) reports the coordinates of a mammoth Decepticon while hiding in the shadow of his dangling scrotum.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen might be a fanboys’ wet dream, but most audiences will find it rather flaccid. To further the scatology, this insipid, sensorially bloated film, like its predecessor, is merde that meets the eye.

Neil Morris