Michael Bay

During the San Francisco car chase in The Rock (1996), Bay's appetite for destruction has a clear purpose. We were properly excited because the stunt work supplied its own pleasure and the pursuit gave the chaos a direction. His speed makes sense here: there is somewhere to get to and a reason to hurry. Elsewhere in the film, he keeps pressing when the scene needs space. He is a good action director whose enthusiasm can make him careless about how much we can take in.

The low angles, saturated colours and restless camera movement belong to a director whose early work was in music videos and commercials. His first feature, Bad Boys (1995), established his action style with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. By Armageddon (1998) and Transformers (2007), he was applying it to disasters and effects-heavy spectacle. The later Pain & Gain (2013) took that forceful approach into black comedy, a change of subject that gave his taste for excess a different use.

The Rock works because Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris give its implausible story people worth spending time with. Bay makes room for them to matter, even amid all the destruction. John Schwartzman's cinematography gives the action scale, while Michael White's production design makes Alcatraz awkward to get around. That physical difficulty is useful: speed is more exciting when the setting puts something in the way. The photography can grow tiring in its insistence, but the film has enough to look at, and enough character, without being hurried through either.

The trouble is Bay's reluctance to let that be enough. Rapid cutting can make action harder to follow, a fault already present in The Rock and repeatedly criticised in the Transformers films. The actors can keep us interested, but they cannot make an impatient cut easier to read. We would start with The Rock, provided the evening calls for noise and a plot that will not bear much inspection.