I'm embarrassed to say I liked something by Michael Bay but...

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2014)

I don't like Michael Bay. He's a terrible director, with his sexism, racism, ugly visuals, mechanical storytelling and scripts which could have been written by 5 year olds. So it's embarrassing for me to admit I like this movie, but I do. It's only a 3 star movie (It's very fun but it's not desperately good in many areas) but I was looking for flaws throughout and I couldn't find that many. It's some ludicrous plot about terrorists taking over Alcatraz and planning to use chemical weapons on San Francisco. Nicolas Cage (before he became a joke) and Sean Connery team up and try to stop them. This film knows its purpose: It wants to entertain and do nothing else. With that, it succeeds. Cynical film goers may hate it, but the film is an insane adrenaline rush with some crazy dialogue, huge shootouts, a lot of big explosions and there's even a random car chase thrown in there. It's hard not to feel exhilarated, and Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery have a lot of chemistry.
However, as you can expect, Michael Bay's direction is less than stellar, and the film isn't very tense and I consider tension to be the most important part of an action movie. The plot is stupid, and the villain is flat. However, it's an action film so what do you expect? This is a fun, well made although slightly overpraised movie with Michael Bay for once being given a good script to work with and it's the perfect antidote to the Transformers films and Bay's many other cinematic abominations. It's a movie which knows what it wants to be and what it should be, and for action junkies it is pretty much a guaranteed good time. The bottom line: Expect loads of fun. Don't expect anything else!
6/10