10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

3. Michael Bay (Ambulance)

Ambulance Jake Gyllenhaal Yahya Abdul-Mateen II
Universal Pictures

If there's one thing you can expect from a Michael Bay movie, it's enough action and explosions to make your eyes glaze over. His latest effort, Ambulance, is no different, with so much Bayhem thrown at the screen that it's a miracle he made it for the relatively modest sum of $40 million.

Bay's desire to use practical effects as much as possible perhaps helped keep that cost so low, and indeed, according to the man himself, there's "very little" CGI in the film. But some of the CGI that is in the film? Well, let's just say that Bay isn't too keen.

In fact, during the movie's press tour, he outright called some of it "sh*t":

"Some of the CGI is sh*t in this movie. There’s a couple shots that I wasn’t happy with, okay?"

Possibly at the behest of the studio - which can't have been pleased with all the bad press - Bay then proceeded to downplay his comments in subsequent interviews, changing his choice of words from "sh*t" to "don't like".

Gee, way to go Michael, that'll definitely make all those hard-working VFX artists feel better about their contribution!

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!