Pearl Harbor (2001)

Director: Michael Bay*

Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding Jr.

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I honestly can’t remember if I saw the film in theaters or later on home video. Considering in the the theater would be May of 2001, and on disc would have been December 2001, the movie would have played distinctly different in the spread of that half a year.

Do I have a memory of seeing it before? Not even in the slightest.

What could possibly go wrong?

Did I Like It: I’m about a minute and a half into this film when I first role my eyes, and I know I’m in for a long three hours. Another three minutes or so and I’m treated to the two main characters as children accidentally launching into flight in a crop duster. Between this and Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), was there a rash of kids accidentally taking flight in the late 1990s/early 2000s? I don’t remember that being a thing? Incidentally, I had enough material fro a review inside of the first half hour. Maybe I’ll add to it as the film proceeds**.

The movie proceeds from there positively groaning to strike a balance between Armageddon (1998)-style bombast and a legitimate docudrama about the world of 1941.

Guess which mode wins out?

Okay, so, at some point in the near future I’m going to have to build the skill of finding nice things to say about bad movies. It’s probably time to start here. Jennifer Garner is a delight as the nerdy, uptight friend of Kate Beckinsale. She should have been the lead, but she’s far more interesting in her few minutes of screen time than any of the other eye-candy women we have here.

That probably says more me than anything else, so I’ll just leave it there.

But let’s get back to a far more pertinent or profound question: Is there a rational reason to watch this film, when From Here to Eternity (1953) is perfectly available? If you’ve got an answer, then I will wait patiently for it.

And, no, “one is in black & white, and the other is in color” is definitely not a valid reason, in case you were wondering.

*I originally typed that as “Michael Nay” and got a deep enough chuckle out of that, it’s a solid bet it’s more entertaining than the rest of the film.

**I did(n’t?). For any of my other thoughts, probably best to go lookat my Letterboxd review. Haven’t we gone on long enough about this one?

Armageddon (1998)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck

Have I Seen It Before: I mean, yeah. I was both alive and awake in any kind of way in 1998, so I think I was kind of obligated*.

Did I Like It: Is there a movie more willfully stupid? Yes, I think The Legend of Zorro (2005) is about 20% dumber than this film. If I hadn’t just recently watched that film, I may have some other candidate. Perhaps the better question is: Is there a more willfully stupid movie that also largely got away with it**?

I submit that there is not.

You might roll your eyes and insist that this is a movie that requires one to turn off their brain. Sure, but with the sheer tonnage of sound in space, the logic of sending oil drillers into space, and the film’s reflexive need to put foreign countries through the most pain so the USA can remain largely unscathed, there’s a maximum yield, right? It’s an onslaught.

All of that could be forgiven, though, if it weren’t for one singular unbelievable moment. Explaining the mission that will save all of humanity, the President (Stanley Anderson, reprising his role from The Rock (1996), meaning this is technically also a sequel to the the original set of James Bond films) says:

And yet, for the first time in the history of the planet, a species has the technology to prevent its own extinction… Through all of the chaos that is our history; through all of the wrongs and the discord; through all of the pain and suffering; through all of our times, there is one thing that has nourished our souls, and elevated our species above its origins, and that is our courage.

Am I some kind of chump for finding the idea that we might be able to fix our problems somehow alluring? Maybe so.

*Speaking of obligating, I actually got pushed into asking a girl to go with me in one of the more lightly humiliating moments of my life. She said no. I mean, I guess it wasn’t that humiliating, objectively, but it was tied to going with the movies, so it felt like an attack on the home turf.

**A weird aberration that—no joke—kept me up a few nights ago: 1998 feels like an alien planet to the here and now. This is the highest grossing film of 1998. Of the top ten highest-grossing films of that year, only one was a sequel (Lethal Weapon 4) and only one was followed by sequels (Dr. Dolittle). Mulan had a re-make, but that hardly counts. Also, before you start screaming “so far” at me, I have a hard time imagining someone green-lighting a Gibson directed Lethal Finale/Lethal Weapon 5 after the dust settles on The Resurrection of the Christ. I think the record will stand.

The Rock (1996)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, Ed Harris, Michael Biehn

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. It’s never been a very important movie in my pantheon.

Did I Like It: There’s always a hard, impenetrable crust of Michael Bayness to any Michael Bay film which make it hard to truly love. He—being the pinnacle of those music video crafters that ended up getting handed the keys to a feature film—can’t quite help himself. Every movie since Bad Boys (1995) always simmers at the wrong end of too-much, and the less said about his later Transformers sequels, the better off we all are.

But it isn’t like the film is unenjoyable, though. I’m struck here by the fact that, for all his failings, Bay has a willingness to cast good people. From John Spencer through Raymond Cruz, not fifteen minutes of the film goes by where I was not pleasantly surprised by a performer’s appearance which I had apparently forgotten since the last time I watched the film.

If you embrace the notion—I dare not say turn off your brain—that it is too much and ride the wave safely to shore, there are worse ways to spend a few hours, especially in those days before he became an action figure salesman*. He set out to make a big, dumb action movie, and that’s what we got…

But, if you take the film on the notion that one James Bond, 007 of MI6 is a codename which several individuals had filled over the years**, and that one of those men were named John Patrick Mason, then this film can transcend it’s dumb roots and become something quite special, indeed.

It does take some mental gymnastics to get there. Best you don’t turn your brain off for the movie.

*To be fair, plenty of very fine filmmakers ended up as action figure salesman. I’m looking in your direction, Mr. Lucas.

**A conclusion which that film series can somewhat support, if you ignore the fact that Lazenby, Moore, and Dalton’s version of the character all apparently were married to a woman named Teresa, now dead. It’s only really difficult to get over during the opening scene of For Your Eyes Only (1981). Ignore it and the Bond universe can become far richer, indeed.

Bad Boys II (2003)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Martin Lawrence (absolutely mystified that he kept top billing going into the sequel; will this keep up with Bad Boys For Life? [2020]?), Will Smith, Gabrielle Union, Jordi Mollà

Have I Seen It Before?: I have a vague memory of watching the first fifteen minutes of it on DVD at some point, but being bored by it. Is that even possible?

Did I like it?: A little less than the original Bad Boys (1995), and I’m left a little uncertain as to how to quantify that difference. Michael Bay is in fine form, eschewing the complete void of human interest that has become his later career. He really should just make clones of Lethal Weapon (1987) and leave the robots to… Well, no one, now that I think about it. 

Smith and Lawrence continue to effortlessly offer the one non-negotiable element for buddy cop movies: chemistry. Each are plenty charming on their own (although one may have more of a continuous record at the box office) but together their so imminently watchable that it isn’t a completely ridiculous notion that the two will come back together for a third film next year.

The movie is shamelessly what it is, for better or worse. So why doesn’t this one work as well as the previous film? Am I just wrong? A possibility. The film reached several worst-of lists in the year of its release. However, it does have a cultural reach that eclipses the original, although that may be more related to its being lionized in Hot Fuzz (2007).

It’s more difficult to quantify something so subjective at first blush, but if I had to pick one element that sinks or swims plenty of movies. The score here is produced by a different composer, and I really prefer the score in the first movie. It might be reductive to be down on a movie for one single element, but just try to watch films like Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), or better yet, Halloween (1978) without the music. Both films become equally unwatchable, which is simply unfathomable given how both of those movies turned out. Music counts, folks.

Bad Boys (1995)

Director: Michael Bay

Cast: Martin Lawrence, Will Smith (last time he gets second billing, me thinks), Téa Leoni, Joe Pantoliano

Have I Seen it Before: I was a child of the 1990s and had cable, so I saw some version of this movie, to be sure.

Did I Like It: What’s not to like? How hard is it to make a buddy cop movie work?

That question may be unfair. The entire genre is dependent on chemistry between the two leads. If it works, you’ve got the next Lethal Weapon (1987). If you get it wrong, suddenly you’re saddled with another Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)*. In what must be unnerving for those who make movie in the genre, that chemistry is largely ephemeral, and can be waylaid by any number of factors and good casting alone may not be enough to save matters.

Luckily, the chemistry between Lawrence and Smith is nearly perfect in its calibration. When the two are sharing a frame and just talking, the film’s charms are undeniable. One can’t be certain if they’re improvising during these sequences, but it feels breezy in a way that seldom can be achieved outside of improvisation. They’re easily funny, which is starkly obvious when it appears that either of the stars deliver one-liners supplied by one of the four credited screenwriters.

This movie even comes from a time before Michael Bay went into autopilot mode while mashing action figures together, and while his style may be a bit too arch for some, it does feel at home in the Miami sun amid endless explosions.

*I’ll be willing to admit that one had some other problems, not the least of which appear to be that the entire rationale for its existence appears to be as a prank Arnold Schwarzenegger played on Stallone. Look it up!