One director is a punchline, Michael Bay, while the other is respected, Michael Mann. Mann is awesome. The heist scene in Heat is impressive. I found Miami Vice to be a great procedural with tons of style and dread. He does have an annoying tendency to film the act of love as a little twitchy. And he, like Bay (and also Apatow), seems to now be collecting his own mafia of go-to scene fillers. Seeing Dominick Lombardozzi as an Irish boy with old-school gangster hair is weird. But I digress...
Public Enemies is a bloodless, long ass film starring my doppelganger as John Dillinger. Depp was good. The story...meh. Needed more stuff getting blow'd up. There were action sequences, but Mann was too faithful, I believe, to the actual material to give us some good chases and battles. Come on, it's early America, throw in some bigger gun battles. Also, there is the problem with what Dillenger did. He robbed banks. Before silent alarms, cameras, dye packets, and other modern security counter measures that most directors use to punch up their films. He just rolls in and robs that shit. You can't really spice it up with out something else. And Mann refuses to spice things up in this movie.
Mann also seems to refuse to glamorize Dillinger beyond what Depp can do with his own smirking charisma. I know how that is, smirking charisma can take you places, but it can't take you past the 90 minute mark in a movie without some good boobies or explosions or fight scenes. Alas, Public Enemies needed some Bay. He needed Bay to blow some shit up, have Steve Buscemi make a cameo, and maybe some gratuitous over-sexualization, like Bay did in T2 with:
or:
or:
[sidenote: Seriously, Bay oversexualizes his films too much. The college campus scenes are ridiculous. Furthermore, the film hovers in the PG13 range on language. Coarse language doesn't improve a film or a bad script. It's lazy. Clean it, Bay, kids are watching!]
Mann took it too seriously, or too lazily as some have asserted, to have fun.
In fact, the scene that starts the movie, the death of Pretty Boy Floyd sort of illustrates how little joy there is in the film. He gets shot in the back and C. Bale just sort of meh stands there. The chase is about as dry as a daylight episode of Cops. The bad guy runs, the cops just fire on him. No drama. People die. There is no beauty in it, because that truth is ugly. And I guess Mann wants us to suffer through his movie because of it.
On the other hand, we have Bay's clusterfuck called Transformers 2. I am going to let you in on a few secrets. I love killing robots. Or to put it bluntly, people killing giant robots such as at the end of the far superior first movie, when the American troops finally get it over on Blackout, that was awesome. Even better was a scene that, thanks to Michael Bay's ineptness, was largely missed. Toward the end of the climactic fight scene, Ironhide basically bodyslams Barricade into pieces. Watch carefully, the cop car drive up to Ironhide and Ironhide has none of it. Barricade gets torn to pieces without even a peep. Dayam, robot get killed. shit get blow'd up, all is good.
First things first, the two robots---black robots---were pretty bad. Diminutive in size and brains, they are the equivalent of slicing Jar Jar Binks into two separate Jars, and putting more black face on them. But, at the end of the day, they weren't *that* bad. They were more like riggers...you know robots who think they're black.
Second, Michael Bay's godawful directing. Look, my go-to joke on Bay is that his films would be about 16 minutes long but for the fact that he seems to film them entirely in slo-mo. With several hard to distinguish robots fighting each other, for once it would have been nice for some slo-mo. Jesus, what the fuck just happened, did that Audi beat up the motorcycle or was that the corvette rescuing bumblebee? What? which anoynmous decipticon was that?
This movie needed Mann's steady hand and big brain. There needed to be some, ah, how you say, procedure and gravitas to it. Instead, it's all blurry shit getting blow'd up. This time around, robots come and go and do stuff and there's no joy to it. Who is the corvette? Is bumblebee really the Autobot's best fighter? Is it wrong for me to think that Sam's mom is kinda hot? Mann would have, I believe, put back some logic and thrill into robot on robot on human action.
Ok, then there's the plot. Complete melt-down. Haters made fun of the first movie but they are teh ghey. TFRM1 had a good plot. It had depth. Things happened, people met, robots died, it was all good. There was the famous KillBox One Alpha scene. In fact, the only escape from reality I found was that I find it *highly unlikely* that once Meghan Fox and Josh Duhamel's characters met, that they would have had time for anything else but humping. That is, once all the robots are dead, Josh would end up with Meghan while Sam would end up having to hang out with his weird friend. But that's just my perspective. Pretty people tend to date pretty people, not Shia LaBoef.
Nonetheless, at the end of the last film, the decepticons had a problem. They lost the war. They have no energy cubes and no way to create new robots. A competent director, like Mann, would have used this to create a different movie. For example, in Blackhawk down, the Somali militia had no almost no advantage over the American forces except for their sheer zombie like determination to stumble into enemy fire and one good trap. That created tension. Bay, on the other hand, ignores this basic premise and the fucking decepticons are so powerful that you lose track of how many tier one (Megatron, Starscream, Blackout, etc.) fighters they have. Note that in this movie, the ratings have changed. Megatron is now about as powerful as starscream while Optimus has also been reduced to just slightly weaker than bumblebee. In fact, I would now say that the Autobot order of battle is:
tier one: no one.
tier two: bumblebee
tier three: optimus prime
tier four: Ironhide
nearly useless: everyone else.
On the other hand, the Decepticon order of battle is:
Invincible: (spoiler)
tier one: Everyone.
That is just lazy film making. A bad director or lazy screenwriter creates tension by making the bad guys super strong, even though there's no reason they should be that strong. It reminds me of Matrix 3 where, from we've been lead to believe, the machines are so weak and power starved, they use people as batteries...yet they fielded an army of 250,000 squiggies!
On the other hand, I love it when people kill robots and I have to say that the US Armed forces with a combined ops from useful friendly countries like, uh, Australia(?) have gotten into the robot killing business. And also, the question "how would an M1 tank with its 14 inches of steel and ceramic armor fare against a decepticon" is answered. M1 kills robot. In fact, a MEU of about 5 tanks and 100 men manages to do more damage the emasculated Autobots. I told my fellow film patron that, oh, Ironhide is the Autobot equivalent of a battleship...pure armor and firepower. Of course, he's nowhere to be seen throughout the film.
But again, I digress. Nothing made any sense. The fight scenes were blurry masses of badly rendered computer images. The plot streaks along. Battles are staged and fought according to dramatic necessity instead of any semblance to right, wrong, weak, or strong.
But still, robots get smashed up. But still, I felt like Megatron at the end of the movie as he stared in disbelief at what just happened. The look on his face is awesome. But you'll just have to suffer through the movie to figure out what could happen to put the baddest transformer out there in his place. Hint: it makes no sense.
So, two films, a lot of potential. Each one got the wrong director.
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