A movie that exists outside of filmmaking grammar, A potent story denied its rightful telling...

Rating: 3/10 (5 June 2016)

There are some real dramatic images at the beginning of Michael Bay's Benghazi tale. The shots involve two or more objects of interest, and their emotional and spatial relationships are established in well-defined frames. This is cellphone footage from people who were outrunning bullets and hopscotching landmines at the moment, but still had an idea that drama only exists when we aren't distracted by superficial artifice. You want subscribers to know you were 1)dying from 2)bomb-inflicted 3)lesions after you upload this on YouTube, not that you started out directing music videos. I would have much preferred a feature composed of a thoughtful montage of these clips.
There's a scene in which A Blonde Lady handles a half-eaten apple. She holds it like it's her first meeting with a pome. Perhaps, because Bay couldn't convince her the character she's playing could ever savor an apple at lunchtime; she's not a Character before, during or after lunchtime. No individuality, no quirks, no venom or charm; she and the apple both are only props on the set, although the apple's career unfairly ends in the wastebin much faster than hers, in spite of its more intriguing performance. And to think, she was created out of a real person, into thin air. At one point, another cast member itemizes her neatly, "I need your eyes and your ears, not your mouth." Hmm......fitting? Or indeliberate irony.
Then comes a brief moment in which the "dialogue" to be exchanged between castmates is, "hey Prop5, how are the twins?" And oh, wouldn't you know as much, since the only characterizations Prop5 has are a beard and a photo of Military Backstory toddlers, he's wearing his beard, AND, fondling the said kid pic. Oh, man. "Crazy cute." "Cute."
For humorous ends, a cast member recalls Ranger School, how once, to express alpha-virility, they rubbed their penises using a superior officer's hat. This is the setup for a joke, and since the joke is about the officer's personality, not dick-wiping, the payoff should be his personal reaction to the nose-wrinkling whiffs of smegma. We never learn this information... wiping's the climax of the joke; Bay demands your laughs without knowing the punchline. Later he'll want tears. Without the...pepper spray, I'm guessing.
That's not to say the movie isn't funny; a guy walks out of a car into an Arab market, and instead of ornate tablecloths, like in Casablanca, he's offered some RPG warheads, and stuff. If you're questioning the sales wisdom of the Libyan vendors, well, it's clearer to them than it is to a silly thinker-person that out here on an Arab street is where a Caucasian guy in a denim shirt would stroll to buy up some high explosive anti-tank munitions. Might be he's on vacation, but, who knows what whims you can stir after flashing the goods.
There are an unforgivable number of incidences of Bay panning across the room, cutting mid-pan, to a static shot on a different side of the room from where the initial rotation would have ended. Why aren't there Razzies for Worst Editing? Perhaps because everyone can easily tell what a bad performance is, but not what is/isn't good editing. So even under Bay, none of the actors are winning so much as Razzies, they stiff their way through what they can, but the editing would out-rasp BvS.
Emotion, Story, Rhythm, Eye-trace, Two-dimensional plane of screen, Three-dimensional space of action; none of that classical nonsense has a place here. Perhaps Michael Bay has only watched music videos and TV ads, and his only-begotten objective for movie-making is to make you maybe buy stuff, even with nothing to sell. More than perhaps.
One way sheepheaded filmmakers always fail us, is failing to understand that an actor on the battlefield having a wife(-and-kids) in flashbacks/cutaways/off-screen isn't yet another dimension. Only honest characterization and uniquely believable drama, arsenic and affection that taste equally real to us existing between them, justifies this device, or tanks it. Could Bay spell drama? That wouldn't explain the tepid video-Chat Scenes between BlackBerrys and MacBook Pros, held by central cast members and throwaway extras representing their sports-ad-girlfriends-cum-wives reading cornfields of clichés to them with passionless investment on either side. "The girls need you, not a tree house." If he didn't know that already, miss, he belongs in a caged institution.
There's a cutaway, in which one of these non-figurative young ladies is weep-reading melodramatic exposition (more tree houses!) sideways to a drive-through operator selling her stuff-to-eat from outside a car window. There is no operator, selling, or edible stuff seen in the shots provided by Michael Bay. That's when this evidenced itself as a 0/10 movie.
The plot of the movie: things blowed and grass growed, because some real-life private-military assets had to protect some Special Agents (American) from equally-real-life Libyan cheap-gun-shooting assets. Wikipedia says.
So, does the movie contain an incisive geopolitical argumentum, constructed out of provable premises and cogent conclusions? Is the Pope Persian?
I did enjoy one scene, involving an American ambassador played by Matt Letscher; he walks up to a podium ready to give the Libyans a Big Speech, and says; "America.....{suspense}....is here for....{suspense}....you!!" They know to clap, real climactic, for this is his speech. Way to evaporate rhetoric down to its essence.
This is certainly a story worth telling, by someone with adult-minded storytelling devices. Bay's approach on the other hand, can be summarized by a brief 90s-MTV low-angle shot of a classified document being shredded; "Read n Destroy," contentedly reflects Cast Member #2. It's safe to surmise his screenwriter read the source material, then came to Read n Destroy as a mantra. If only he'd had a half-good memory, a worthwhile movie might have come of it. 3/10. Overly generous, for such execrable film-direction. But hey, Bay does use some practical special effects, and, let's see, David Costabile gives a non-rotten one-chord performance.