Every Michael Bay Movie Ranked From Worst To Best
4. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers Of Benghazi
13 Hours is that hard-to-come-by Michael Bay movie that feels mature, like it wasn't made with adolescent boys in mind.
Compared to the heightened silliness and blatant disregard for the laws of physics seen in the likes of Transformers, Pain & Gain and Armageddon, 13 Hours is an effective, gritty, ground-level war story that lacks the characters it needed to make it great, but boasts several amazing battle sequences and a more heartfelt throughline than we've come to expect from the director.
13 Hours is a win for Bay in particular because, unlike so many of his other pictures, the violence here is not glamourized. Here, war is brutal, unforgiving, and packs real consequences.
Had Bay taken his usual approach - with all those slo-mo shots, directing his action like it's porn - the battles here would have felt insincere and unrealistic.
It was important that 13 Hours felt like it took place in our world, and everything from the murky lighting to the unstable camerawork hammers home that point with great success.