6 Underground. Michael Bay. 2019. ☆☆☆☆☆☆
Huh! It’s that guy from Deadpool! In a plane! And now he faked crashing the plane! And now they’re in a car chase! Is this the best movie ever? And the car chase is in Italy! And now there’s guns! There’s somebody in the back seat doing surgery to remove some bullets! Now there’s more car chase! Now they crashed into a food cart! EXPLOSIONS! Witty repartee from the Deadpool guy! Now there’s a helicopter joining the car chase! Dick jokes! More explosions! EVERYTHING”S EXPLODING ALL THE TIME!
THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER
This is Michael Bay at his most unhinged. It’s methtacularific. It’s his auteur movie. There’s shots from inside the bullet wounds! When two watermelons strike each other, there’s an explosion! There’s never been a movie like this before. Who knew that Bay was held back by the studios and we’d never seen just how crazy he is before? I feel like a new school of film criticism has to be established to properly evaluate this movie, but that’s probably because I’ve just read that book translating articles from Cahiers de Cinema from the 50s.
Bay is so detail oriented. There’s all these itsy-bitsy perfect little things in every one of these over-the-top scenes (like the assholes wearing Stone Island sweaters). It’s hard to even contemplate how much coke was snorted during the editing and compositing of this movie. I can just picture Bay shouting at the editor for weeks FUCK YEAH! FUCK! MORE! FUCK! YEAH!!!
It’s hilarious.
If I have anything negative to say about this movie, it’s that the soundtrack is lame. It’s mostly bits from Now That’s What I Call Standard Generic Tense Movie Music vol XVIII, and then there’s the occasional generic, boring rock track. It should have used Chicago Footwork or something. Something more… brutal.
Even the small Portishead snipped felt all wrong. The scenes where they used dubstep worked fine.
And weirdly (or perhaps not), my other quibble is also sound-related: It’s frequently difficult to hear what the actors are saying. And they’re often saying funny, surprising, over-the-top stuff (well, everything about this movie is excessive), so it’s really annoying not being able to hear them half of the time. (So I switched the subtitles on halfway through, which is why there aren’t as many shots from the last half of this movie, but it continues looking as awesome as the first half does.)
Seeing this while drunk or high (or both) is probably a good idea, but this really is something else. It’s sui generis. This is where the future starts:
A migraine headache in cinematic form.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.