Jeremy’s Tophunder №71: The Rock

8 min readApr 17, 2020

I was wondering when we were going to get around to the elephant in the room, but now feels like as good a time as any.

I love Michael Bay movies. I love them. Michael Bay directed four movies on my Tophunder list, a number eclipsed only by Stephen Spielberg and Christopher Nolan (five each), and leaving Bay tied with Adam McKay and Quentin Tarantino. There are more entries from Michael Bay than there are from David Fincher (three) and Martin Scorcese (two).

I’ll cop to it — I like bad movies.

The easiest way to understand how I feel about movies is with an overly-simplistic graph that I just spent less than three minutes making in Microsoft Paint. I’ll embed it here for easy reference.

As you can see, the movies I enjoy the most are movies that most people would agree are “good,” well-done, well-written, well-acted, well-directed movies. Even if a super high-quality movie didn’t make my Tophunder, like, say, Casablanca, I still greatly enjoy watching it. As movies get worse, I enjoy them less. This seems rather self-explanatory. However, there’s a point on the graph where I start to enjoy movies more -because- they’re bad. The worst movies for me to watch are movies that are just kind of average and don’t bring a lot to the table. Movies like We Bought a Zoo, Knight and Day, 2 Guns, Thor: Dark World, or pretty much any movie starring Gerard Butler or Jennifer Aniston. Like, they aren’t good, and they aren’t bad, but I’ve seen them once and I have really no interest in seeing them again.

There is a sub-class of movies, however, that become better and better in spite of the fact that they’re, well, just not very good. For some people, it’s mindless romantic comedies. For some people, it’s anything Adam Sandler has done in the last 15 years. For some people, it’s small independent movies that might have a great acting performance but are otherwise unimpressive. For me, it’s big action blockbusters that are short on plot but long on explosions. Like I mentioned, there are four Michael Bay movies in my Tophunder.

I have The Rock as my highest-ranked Michael Bay movie. It’s the only one the critics seemed to enjoy. In Bay’s 14 career directorial efforts dating back to Bad Boys in 1995, the average score on Rotten Tomatoes is a cool 37 percent. The Rock is the highest-rated, and still only managed to convince two out of every three critics that the movie is worthwhile, clocking in at 66 percent.

There are many reasons I love The Rock, but I want to touch on the reasons that happen to overlap with the reasons I love just about every Michael Bay movie.

First of all, I’m not sure anybody in any Michael Bay movie is ever acting. He casts actors to play themselves. In The Rock, Nicolas Cage plays Nicolas Cage. Sean Connery plays Sean Connery. Ed Harris plays Ed Harris. The only known actor in the movie that might even seem vaguely out-of-place is John C. McGinley, but that’s only because he went on to do Office Space and Scrubs after the fact. In 1996, McGinley was best known from Platoon and Point Break.

This is a common trend in Bay movies. Will Smith just plays Will Smith in Bad Boys. Shia Lebeouf plays Shia Lebeouf in Transformers. Bruce Willis plays Bruce Willis in Armageddon. Ben Affleck plays Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. They practically don’t even need names for the characters (and half the time, I can’t remember what their names are anyway). Beyond that, Bay populates the rest of the cast with, for the most part, good actors who play versions of themselves that we’re all familiar with. In The Rock, you have John Spencer as the FBI Director, David Morse as Ed Harris’ second in command, plus random small roles for guys like William Forsythe, Phillip Baker Hall, and Xander Berkeley. Look at the cast of Armageddon, or Pearl Harbor, or any of the Transformers movies. Sure, you end up with a Tyrese Gibson every once in a while, but even when you do, it kind of works itself out because those actors are playing the same role they play in every movie, anyway.

The second thing The Rock does well is take advantage of Bay’s distinct visual style. Bay is famous (or perhaps infamous) for packing as much stuff into the frame as he can. He will create layer upon layer of movement, whether from the environment, the characters, or both. Everything moves, and it moves in a way that provides a sense of scale or epicness. Take the car chase scene early in the movie as an example. The movie takes place in San Francisco, famous for its hills, so obviously we’ll take advantage of that and have cars bomb down the hills at top speed. We’ll put Sean Connery in a Hummer and Nicolas Cage in a Ferrari, and we’ll have Connery smash into as many things as he can, including a fruit stand, a construction site, other cars, a truck carrying jugs of water, and a telephone pole. At every opportunity, we’ll show cars with no wheels on the ground as they throttle down the hill at full speed. Oh, and by the way, let’s have about 150 cuts over the course of three minutes. None of these choices are random — they’re all designed to create a frenetic pace and a sense of epic scale.

Now, are any of them original, or particularly difficult to think of or pull off? No. Not at all. In fact, Bay often steals from himself. But just because something is unoriginal doesn’t mean it’s bad. I read a great analogy for Bay once: Imagine someone who could write with perfect penmanship. They can use a pen and perfectly replicate the typefaces you see from word processors. But they don’t know how to spell. That’s Michael Bay. When he writes out a story, it looks amazing, but you can’t quite always follow what he’s trying to say. With Bay’s movies, they’re always very visually complex and interesting, but they aren’t always visually clear. And when it comes to storytelling, Bay has a hard time telling a coherent story, whether that be visually or with the progression of the plot. And it’s not like he’s telling particularly complex stories, either. Most of his movies have a very straightforward, high-concept premise. He has issues with storytelling because he’s so much more focused on making a movie that looks cool, rather than a movie that flows story-wise.

It’s a blessing and a curse. If you were going to break down Michael Bay’s movies into their component parts, you’d get epic visuals and sound, predictable, campy, but snappy dialogue, relatable acting, but rudimentary plot movement. He makes movies that you don’t have to think about, and most of the time, they’re actually better when you don’t.

The Rock is also a surprisingly quotable movie. From start to finish, it’s laced with profanity (somewhat unusual for Bay, who usually tries to keep his movies PG-13 for better box office success), but for whatever reason, Nic Cage’s character doesn’t swear. Every time his character would otherwise be swearing, it’s a surprisingly hysterical line. One truly heroic YouTube user made a master-cut of just about all of Cage’s lines of dialogue in the movie — it runs about 25 minutes long but could not possibly recommend it any higher. I had fully planned on listing my favorite lines, but realized it would just take up too much space.

If you’re looking for a reason to hate The Rock (beyond, you know, the movie itself), here’s a good one: It’s part of the reason the UK got involved in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No, seriously. The Chief of MI6 at the time claimed that the agency had evidence of Saddam Hussein and his regime developing advanced chemical weapons. However, there were doubts cast on the evidence, because they bore a striking resemblance to the description of the chemical weapons portrayed in The Rock, down to the idea that they were held in glass beads or spheres (which, according to chemical weapons and/or poison gas specialists, is laughably stupid — something that dangerous should never be contained by something as breakable as glass). When it finally came out that the intelligence was, in fact, laughably stupid, MI6 still failed to brief the Prime Minster at the time (Tony Blair), even though he had already been briefed on the original intelligence. The UK then used claims of chemical weapons production as their justification for entering the war.

Nice.

I love The Rock (and other Michael Bay movies that we’ll get to later) for all the right reasons cool visuals and special effects, but also for all the wrong reasons, too. It’s a strange peccadillo in my movie tastes. It’s not like I’m just in it for the big explosions and I don’t care about story — my top five movies are all story-driven movies with no real action to speak of (and a few of them I’d even call pretty vanilla when it comes to cinematography). Effect-driven blockbusters are just my guilty pleasure, I guess, and I don’t care if they’re that good. The Rock is better than most people give it credit for, but it’s still not that great. Either way, I like it more than enough for it to warrant inclusion on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One

21. The Other Guys

22. Remember The Titans

24. Apollo 13