Those who want to freshen up their upstairs room, of course, do not opt for refined art house fare, but allow themselves to be sprinkled with exuberant spectacles. Michael Bay is certainly always a good address in that regard, because hardly any other director offers such megalomaniacal action, which is increasingly subject to the pretense of outdoing itself from scene to scene. The result of this isn’t just some brutal explosions, crushing gunfire, or sheer CGI overkill. Under the direction of Michael Bay, a lot of cars also have to die.
As a new study of has now discovered, Michael Bay is now officially the absolute terror of every car: In the course of his career so far, Bay has wrecked 354 (!) vehicles. That means: in the 15 films Bay has directed so far, an average (!) 24 cars have broken down. Of course, it should be noted that in every single “Transformers” tear, significantly more carts were disassembled into their individual parts than, say, in “Pain & Gain” or “Armageddon.”
This once again underlines the destructive reputation of Michael Bay, for whose orgies of destruction a separate term (“Bayhem”) was even coined. When you also consider how far Michael Bay is at the top of the list of screen car destroyers, it becomes especially clear that Bay is simply THE is:
- Michael Bay (354)
- Justin Lin (135)
- John Landis (120)
- Christopher Nolan (83)
- joe & Anthony Russo (80)
- John Woo (77)
- Richard Donner (61)
- Stephen Spielberg (60)
- Paul Greengrass (51)
- Lana And Lilly Wachowski (45)
Somehow Michael Bay is a real exception in today’s action cinema. Not only because his very own style is recognizable at every second (his staging gesture is simply too mannered for that). But also because Bay stands up without any false shame for a cinema that is completely devoted to a very adolescent curiosity. You can often judge that, but Michael Bay’s through-composed lust for destruction is almost unique.