Review: "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi"

If you're looking for politics in "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi," then you'll be searching awhile. Told in the vérité style of "Black Hawk Down" and "Lone Survivor," this gripping war drama from director Michael Bay aims only to capture the on-the-ground events of the terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy outpost in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.

Although that night has proved ample fodder for presidential politics, congressional hearings and more, Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan doggedly stick to the account from the book by Mitchell Zuckoff, who interviewed the Annex Security Team, which defended the compound and tried (unsuccessfully) to rescue Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

The team consisted of CIA employees and ex-military contractors tasked with guarding them. Bay, known for the rambling special effects-heavy "Transformers" films and the like, ditches the fancy trappings and focuses on the rough human camaraderie of soldiers who have left any causes behind and simply fight for each other.

Others will get the glory and the medals, but their reward is "We get to go home," says Jack Silva, a fairly recent arrival to the mission played by John Krasinski. He serves as the audience's eyes and ears.

Bay and Hogan immerse us in the world of the grunts, who live in an untidy compound about a mile down the road from the lush, clean proto-embassy. They share the space with a couple dozen CIA operatives, who are portrayed as eggheads whom the soldiers must guard with jock-like disdain -- former football gods forced to ferry around the math nerds.

"What are all the Jason Bournes doing downstairs?" one snidely asks during a break in the firefight.

At first, the six members of the team are hard to distinguish from each other, all bearded and scary with grim senses of humor. But the cast and crew show us bits of humanity in between the bluster -- the stolen video chats with kids, regretful longing for absent wives, and so on.

James Badge Dale plays the leader, "Rone" Woods, who battles daily with the nebbishy CIA station chief (David Costabile). The spook resents the intrusion these security guys have on their intelligence gathering, even complaining about their grunting exercising outside his window. It's he who refuses to let the elite soldiers rush over to the embassy, dooming Stevens, but he's just following orders from above.

The sprawling battle sequences grab you by the shirt, first the rescue mission to the embassy and then the rigid defense of their own annex. Forced to give up the computer-generated protagonists, Bay proves adept at putting us in the shoes of the flesh-and-blood ones. The scariest moments are not when the bullets are flying, but as the soldiers watch strange men approaching the compound, not knowing if they're friend or foe.

Being a decided member of the nerd class, I might be inclined to disfavor a movie where the beefy soldiers are brazenly glorified while the thinking types are seen as insufferable fools. But "13 Hours" is less about pointing fingers than putting some unheralded guys on pedestals. It's a riveting tale of reaching for heroism amid the chaos.

Video review: "Transformers: Age of Extinction"

For the record, I haven’t liked any of the “Transformers” movies. I was a little too old for the 1980s television show, but I’ve caught up with it since and wasn’t impressed. None of the more recent TV spinoffs, either. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that I’m a Transformer-hater. In my view, they’re less than meets the eye.

Mainly, it’s because I just don’t understand them. They’re supposed to be an ancient race of sentient robots who can change shapes … so why would they change into things like trucks and jets, which wouldn’t even be invented for millennia?

The fact that the entire enterprise was just a marketing ploy for a line of Japanese toys doesn’t help; the whole thing is the result of a mercenary, rather than creative, impulse.

So here is the fourth movie, “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” from director Michael Bay. All of the original cast is gone, notably Shia Labeouf, replaced by Mark Wahlberg as an obsessive inventor who stays up nights working on gadgets but somehow remembers to lift weights so he looks good in a tight T-shirt.

He buys an old semi-tractor trailer truck to fix up, and lo and behold, it’s actually Optimus Prime (voice of Peter Cullen), leader of the good Autobots, who are now few and scattered. It seems a couple of human bad guys (Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer) are using the metal remains of the dead transformers to create an army of new ones, so they need to be smashed up.

There’s also a nefarious transformer bounty hunter, who’s after Optimus so he can use his head for some familiarly murky end-of-the-world type nonsense.

The computer generated robots look better than they ever have, especially the action scenes, which have been slowed down enough for the eye to track. The characters and plot, though, are mere afterthoughts – oftentimes the movie seems like an unrelated string of action scenes.

This fourth Transformers flick – reportedly not the last – isn’t the worst of the bunch. But the franchise has yet to learn how to take on the shape of quality filmmaking.

The movie comes with a host of video extras, though you’ll have to shell out for the Blu-ray combo pack to get them – the DVD version comes with exactly nothing.

The centerpieces are an extensive interview with Bay on his approach to action movies, and “Evolution Within Extinction,” a comprehensive making-of documentary touching on all aspects of the production, with a heavy emphasis on the CG creation of the transformers.

There are also a handful of other featurettes, and an Angry Birds video game tie-in.

Movie: D
Extras: B-plus

Review: "Transformers: Age of Extinction"

Just a quick review today, folks. Paramount did not see fit to screen the fourth transforming robots movie in advance for critics, so I had to hit a late show Thursday night. At nearly three hours long, that kept me up well past midnight.

I didn't like any of the three previous movies directed by Michael Bay, and "Transformers: Age of Extinction" is no exception to the rule. It's the quintessential summer movie: big, loud and dumb. In this case the dumbness dominates the loudness and bigness.

I honestly wonder if this movie had a screenplay prior to the start of production. It's nothing more than a slapped-together string of action scenes with little correlation to a narrative stream. Bay and the person credited with the screenplay, Ehren Kruger, seem like they were trying to slap together a little bit of stuff from every type of successful action picture.

As a result, there are hardly any robots in the first half of the movie, but lots of car chases defying the laws of gravity, a la "The Fast and the Furious." Then there's a whole long sequence exploring a huge, dilapidated spaceship that has the look and feel of "Prometheus." An intergalactic bounty hunter comes after Optimus Prime's head (twice) for the "Predator" parts.

We even get some chop-socky action in the third act set in Beijing, because you know that every Asian person knows martial arts. There's no Shia LaBeouef around anymore -- thank God for brown paper bags -- so Mark Wahlberg fills in as a tinpot inventor who finds a crippled Optimus in truck form and nurses him back to life.

He's the sort of guy who works in his barn laboratory all night and forgets to eat, but somehow remembers to hit the free weights religiously to keep his upper body properly engorged. He's a single dad to an uppity teen girl (Nicola Peltz), whose job is to tag along everywhere he goes so she can become imperiled and in need of rescuing.

She has an older beau who's Irish and a car racer, which comes in handy for those early street scenes. Later, when the transformers all turn from vehicles back into robots, he has little to do but stand around and make protestations of love -- not to his girlfriend, but her old man.

Stanley Tucci and Kelsey Grammer play the evil old white guys who are the heavies, a Steve Jobs-like tycoon and Machiavellian CIA chief, respectively. They conspire to melt down the living metal of the Autobots and Decepticons killed in the last movie and turn them into their own personal army of Transformers. One of them somehow inherits the psyche of Megatron, just so he and Optimus can have another (aborted) duke-out.

The bounty hunter's name is Lock Down, and he has the impressive power to turn his entire face into a huge sniper rifle. I won't even touch the Freudian aspects. OK, yes I will -- Lock Down and his big Penis Head wants to trade Optimus to the bad humans in exchange for a Seed, which can be used to bomb organic matter into metal fodder for more Transformers. Whole lotta sexual innuendo going on underneath this dippy story of warring robot factions.

The CG-generated robots are an improvement over the previous movies. When the Transformers fought in the earlier flicks, it was like watching two piles of metal junk caught in a tornado colliding. There was nothing for the eye to track. Here, the Transformers remain more or less recognizable. Though, other than Optimus and a bearded (?) fellow voiced by John Goodman, their faces don't really stand out.

I confess I've never understood the concept of the Transformers. They've existed for thousands or millions of years, but somehow can only take on the shape of technology that humans wouldn't invent for a long, long time?

Also, the abilities of the Transformers seem to morph on a moment's notice according to the desires of the plot. For instance, I distinctly remember Optimus losing an arm in the last movie. Although he revives from his truck-coma in a pretty beat-up state, the arm is right there. Then he drives by another vehicle that flashes a light beam at him, and not only does it heal all his injuries it turns him into a more modern model of a semi-tractor trailer with a cool flaming paint job. Huh?

(I sure wish I could use this technology on my 1999 Buick.)

And, after walking everywhere to engage with his enemies, and even mounting an ancient dinosaur Transformer like a horse, at the end he suddenly whips out some leg jets and flies off into space.

Look, I know this isn't meant to be Shakespeare. We need a certain percentage of our movie fare to just be escapist entertainment. Hearty foods balanced by desserts and all that. But I don't think it's too much of a request that our silly movies possess some semblance of narrative coherence, or that the human characters have more dimensions than computer-generated dingbots.

I'd hoped the "Transformers" movies were over, but reportedly this new film is actually the start of a new trilogy from Michael Bay & Co. The Autobots will only become extinct when people stop paying for this claptrap.

Review: "Pain & Gain"

Here is a movie that is just one painful-to-watch misfire after another. It's about a trio of lunkhead bodybuilders who stumble through a series of increasingly grisly crimes under the hot Miami sun. And it's directed by Michael Bay -- you know, "Transformers, "Armageddon," etc.? And it's a comedy.

Well, at least in theory.

In actuality, there's barely a titter in this overlong, dull and dimwitted tale. I like to brag that I've never walked out of a movie, but "Pain & Gain" tested my mettle to the max.

I am glad I hung around, because the last 15 minutes or so actually manages to find some kind of groove, where the comedy is mostly intentional and the satire of the 1990s up-with-me movement plucks a few ironical notes. It hardly makes the joyless couple of hours that came before any less tolerable.

Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, who sees physical perfection as the answer to a life of disappointment and second-tier status. He spends his days as a personal trainer to the rich and obnoxious, yearning to join them. His sidekicks are Paul and Adrian (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie), fellow iron-pumpers without a plan, until Daniel supplies a homicidal one.

At first we think this might be a send-up of the muscle craze of the last few decades, particularly the steroid-happy era when bigger was always considered better, not matter what sort of strange chemicals people shot into their bodies to achieve freakishly oversized pecs and biceps.

When we first see Lugo, he's doing upside-down stomach crunches on the roof of the Sun Gym. "I'm hot!" he shouts to himself as encouragement. "I'm big!"

But Bay and his screenwriters, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, end up fetishizing the very warped culture they're trying to mock. Wahlberg, Johnson and to a lesser extent Mackie are pumped up to a ridiculous degree, and Bay's camera lovingly caresses every bulge and curve.

Between this movie and "Magic Mike," it's been a banner year for engorged, tanned and waxed male flesh.

Lugo and his crew hatch a plan to kidnap slimy local businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over his beachside mansion, big boat and bank accounts to them. Despite, rather than because of, their best efforts they eventually succeed, and find life in the fast lane isn't as advertised.

The actors spend a lot of time doing motor-mouthed deliveries of dialogue that are supposed to be funny but just occupy time and space. For Lugo, his tirades are mash-ups of get-rich motivational gimmicks and sports mumbo-jumbo. Adrian dreams of landing a big, beautiful girlfriend despite the, uh, diminutive effects juicing has wrought on his body.

Paul is the most interesting of the trio, a brutal-looking ex-con who's recently sobered up and found Jesus. He ends up bonding with Victor while purportedly guarding him, which leads to complications when their scheme reaches its only logical denouement.

The most unbelievable thing about "Pain & Gain" is that it's actually based on a true story. The fact that they managed to make a movie based on such a wacky premise so limp is almost impressive in a twisted way.

Review: "Transformers: Dark of the Moon"

The third go-round with the killer robots from outer space gets points for coherence -- at least when it comes to individual scenes, if not the story as a whole.

My biggest beef with the first two "Transformers" movies was that they were slick, soulless pieces of entertainment built around special effects that just weren't very special. The heroic Autobots, who can transform into mechanized sentient beings into trucks and sports cars and such, just weren't visually distinctive.

Other than stalwart leader Optimus Prime (voice by Peter Cullen) and Bumblebee, who's a bright yellow sports car in his disguised form, I could never really even tell them apart.

Things got worse whenever they went into battle with the Decepticons, their enemy cousins. Director Michael Bay and an army of CG animators churned out one confusing action scene after another, with the Transformers changing forms while flipping each other around like WWE wrestlers with chunks of metal flying off constantly.

With little for the eye to track, the audience couldn't tell where one robot ended and another began. At the risk of quoting myself, I wrote that experiencing these movies was "like watching piles of welded metal scrap caught in a Kansas twister."

Bay and the gang must have heard the clamor, because the action sequences are greatly improved in "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." They are relatively straightforward and coherent, and even manage to occasionally be viscerally affecting.

The plot, though, is a hot mess of seemingly endless exposition, double crosses, people running hither and fro without much reason, and a lot of unnecessary humans.
Shia LaBeouf reprises his role as Sam Witwicky, the hapless kid who is accurately dubbed "an alien bad news magnet." Whenever something is up with the Autobots and Decepticons, Sam is bound to be in the middle of it.

Having helped save the world twice, Sam is now out of college and can't find a job. His previous incongruously hot girlfriend (Megan Fox) has been replaced by another, Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), an English lass with thing for puppy-eyed losers like Sam. I did enjoy the barbed jokes aimed at Fox, who famously exited the franchise after saying some less-than-kind things about Bay & Co.

"She was mean," one of the smaller, impish Autobots quips.

The latest Decepticon scheme again features head baddie Megatron (Hugo Weaving) conspiring to defeat the humans and their Autobot allies using some new cosmic thingamajig. This time it's some pillars that were stowed away on a spaceship called The Ark when the Autobots were in their final days of losing the war against their enemies.

This ship crash-landed on the moon in 1961, and in an interminably long prologue sequence, we learn that the entire Apollo moon missions were undertaken for the sole purpose of exploring the wreckage.

They key to the magic pillars is Sentinel Prime, the long-lost Autobot leader who is resurrected by Optimus. Sentinel is voiced by Leonard Nimoy, who brings a new meaning to his familiar trope as Spock about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.

A whole lot of new human characters are introduced, without much purpose that I can see. Frances McDormand is a coldly calculating defense honcho; John Malkovich is a flaky CEO who gives Sam a job; Patrick Dempsey turns up as a rich guy whose sneer leaves no doubt about his loyalties in the coming conflict.

"Transformers: Dark of the Moon" is still cinematic empty calories, but it is marginally better than its predecessors, if only because the actions scenes have a semblance of sense.

2.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

Director Michael Bay is the king of the big, dumb summer action movie, and "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is as big and dumb as they come.

Surprisingly, though, it actually manages to improve on 2007's "Transformers" by stirring up a dramatic moment or two centered around robot hero Optimus Prime. In a summer wasteland of disappointing movies, Optimus (emphatically voiced by Peter Cullens) was the best cinematic hero of the season.

The action scenes are still an exercise in migraine-inducing computer-generated special effects, as heroic Autobots and villainous Decepticons tangle in a blur of metal pieces and widgets. Since both can transform into other things, it's virtually impossible to tell where one robot begins and another ends.

The story is a mishmash of gobbledygook about a secret Decepticon overlord named the Fallen who wants to set off an ancient weapon hidden long ago on Earth, but first he needs a special key.

Human protagonist Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) is somehow involved once again, mainly as an excuse for him to do a lot of running from the bad guys, with Megan Fox tagging along as the obligatory -- and totally unnecessary -- eye candy.

The movie attempts to make up for its lack of sense with an inundation of extra material.

Both DVD and Blu-ray versions come with a feature-length commentary by Bay and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman; an extensive making-of documentary; a featurette accompanying Bay to the film's Tokyo premiere; a look at the "Transformer" franchise's 25-year history; extended scenes; pre-visualization renderings of robots and action sequences; and the "New Divide" music video by Linkin Park.

The Blu-ray also comes with an interactive "Allspark" game; data files on individual robots including personal timeline; and featurettes on the marketing of the movie.

Movie: 2 stars
Extras: 3.5 stars