Review by Nick Armstrong
On September 19th, 2018, actor Ryan Reynolds released a video on his YouTube channel entitled “6 Underground,” in which he leans against a wall and cheekily tells the camera that his favorite part of filming with Michael Bay is the stillness – while there is an explosive car accident taking place directly behind him. What worried me about this brief video is that, in the comment section, many people made jokes that the video must have been directed by Michael Bay himself, strictly because of the explosion in the background. This is not to say that Bay’s films are not categorized by explosions and mayhem, but it’s this shallow read that characterizes much of the work that Reynolds gets his hands on. Deadpool, a so-called “self-aware” superhero film, relies on the safety of the several successful films that came before it. His self-deprecating sense of humor feels more like an attempt to build a false sense of trust for potential consumers than it does a genuine intent to improve. Furthermore, upon noticing that the film’s screenplay would be helmed by Deadpool co-writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, my hope that Bay’s voice would shine through was only diminishing.
And it’s not untrue that the final result often feels like a battle between Reynolds and Bay, particularly when the plot requires Reynolds to be self-deprecating in a far more morbid way than he’s used to. Reynolds and co. bring their established sarcasm that I feared would undermine Bay’s signature style, but said style is so excessively loud that Reynolds’s phony shtick really only highlights the borderline nihilistic destruction that takes place around him. In turn, Bay’s remarkably fast-paced filmmaking undermines whatever ironic detachment Reynolds and co. brought in the first place. In the opening 20 minute action set piece – where Bay comes hot out of the gate with a tasteless intensity he hasn’t harnessed since 2003’s Bad Boys II – it may feel like an off-puttingly self-aware Michael Bay parody when, in the span of one minute, the car has to avoid hitting a group of puppies, babies, and angry nuns, but that begs the question of whether Bay hasn’t always been self-aware and people just refused to give him credit for it. If I could make a comparison, what I would compare their dynamic to would be that of Ernest Cline and Steven Spielberg, who worked together on Ready Player One: everything that comes across as corny and/or tasteless in Cline’s novel feels entirely different in the context of Spielberg’s perspective, whose connection to pop culture ran far deeper than Cline’s did, offering a whole new integrity to Cline’s fan-fiction property. Similarly, Bay renders Reynolds and co.’s comprehension of his work through his own prism of tactile filmmaking and ambiguous self-awareness. Bay puts so much on the screen at any given time that it practically negates parody. That tension between creative forces leaves the film riding a constant line between unashamedly dorky and embarrassingly ironic, but I think it largely comes out on the side of the latter. Even the film’s needle drops – which is 50% Muse, 50% songs that were trendy about 5-6 meme cycles ago – when paired with Bay’s imagery, recall the work of Michael Mann’s films more than it does whatever Enya song is played ironically in either Deadpool film. The question then, I think, is: why parody something if it will never be half as fun as the thing you’re parodying?
Reynolds’ character – known only as One, and each of his team members have a corresponding number as well – works best for me as a Bay surrogate, too. It’s also the only reason I find him as tolerable as I do in this film. One is a billionaire who fakes his own death in order to live outside of the system and use his resources to help others while getting revenge on evil people, since the government is doing neither. This may sound fairly vague, but many of the film’s superficial plot elements are both unclear and unimportant. Though I posited that they are opposing creative forces, in viewing Reynolds’ One as a Bay surrogate, the film started to take shape for me as I was reminded of Jerry Lewis’s final directorial effort Smorgasbord (or Cracking Up). In that film, Lewis plays his typical klutz character, though it is a particularly morbid take on him: the film opens with a series of suicide attempts by the character, all of which fail miserably. It’s a particularly uncomfortable scene because the combination of suicide and comedy is a taboo, and although Bay does not play himself like Lewis does, 6 Underground opens practically the same way, it’s just that since Bay’s method is high octane action, the association with suicide is far less uncomfortable. In fact, it could be interpreted as heroic. This is where the film becomes interesting to me, because – like this year’s terrific Gemini Man, although to a different degree – the action is underscored by One’s opening monologue in which he calls attention to his comfort with no longer being alive. Just about every mission in any action film is a suicide mission, but there is a far more morbid emphasis on that here. In Vanity Fair, Bay recently broke down his several near-death experiences on set and it is difficult to unsee the film through that prism.
One also reiterates many times throughout the film that the group is “not a family” and resists any attempts by the group to familiarize themselves with one another. His thought process is that they all must give up everything in order to fight back, including any semblance of personality. Coming off of 5 Transformers films – save for a couple side projects in the meantime – it sounds like there could be a connection between this idea and what Bay was expected to do as a director on those films. It seems as though Bay’s morals are being called into question, as they remain relatively unclear. Where are we supposed to stand with these characters? Beyond their intentions, they are reprehensible people with little regard for humanity. I think that contributes to the reading that Bay is self-aware and that the demolition that occurs in the film is representative of the potential damage of the film industry, but there are conflicts of interest there, whether Bay believes that his bubbled-up privilege causes damage or not. Regardless, I think throughout his career, his hyper-stylized worldview has consistently pointed a mirror back at America, making them question what it is they really desire. I’d liken his work to Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street, in that it indulges in the obvious benefits of this lifestyle before reminding us of how deeply amoral it all is. I may not be as willing to give Bay that benefit of the doubt if not for his film Pain & Gain, which came out the same year as Scorsese’s and had a remarkably similar message and method of delivery. These readings, though, often come from a proximity to an echo chamber that allow us to believe that no one could possibly believe that The Wolf of Wall Street, for example, glorifies Jordan Belfort’s actions when that is absolutely not out of the question. It comes from rewarding filmmaker’s intentions as opposed to considering the sheer cognitive versatility of American audiences. All of this is to say that I think it is completely fair to question these things as opposed to giving complete, unconditional trust to the powerful directors who are making these films, which actually feels in line with the insecurity of Bay’s characters here. Should we trust them? Can we? And even if we can trust the sincerity of his characters, can we trust Michael Bay in the first place? I’m not so sure he thinks we should.