This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

John Mason (Sean Connery): Are you sure you're ready for this?
Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage): I'll do my best.
John Mason: Your "best?" Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.
Stanley Goodspeed: Carla *was* the prom queen.
John Mason: Really?
Stanley Goodspeed: Yeah.

When we talk about ranking the greatest action movies of all time, a handful of names immediately spring to mind. Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwartzeneggar, Tony Scott, among them, but definitely also Michael Bay. While a third of his movies are part of the Transformers franchise, Bay’s prior work had broad mass appeal, and his most recent film, AmbuLAnce, made into my personal top 15 in 2022. While The Rock was his second film, it is maybe the one that has the best distillation of his ethos. The film follows FBI chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicholas Cage) and John Mason (Sean Connery), a supersoldier the U.S. government is holding captive on their mission to infiltrate Alcatraz, where General Hummel (Ed Harris) and his Recon Marines are holding San Francisco hostage using rockets containing a deadly poison gas. Mason, the only man to ever successfully escape from the island prison is bribed to join the mission with the promise of a pardon and release. This immediately sets up Bay’s general ethos when it comes to masculinity: the suits sit back and decide who lives and dies, while the guys with boots on the ground pay the price. Masculine relationships are based on mutual respect, and the guys at the top do not respect anyone.

Bay’s ethos is underlined a few places within the film. Most obviously via Hummel’s main motivation for taking the island and pointing rockets at San Francisco. He is using the only leverage he believes he has in order to get what he wants: $100 million dollars to share among the families of 83 Marines who were killed in covert operations under his command–operations so covert the families were never compensated for those deaths. Hummel doesn’t actually want to use the weapons, but he knows enough to know there are few countermeasures at the Pentagon’s disposal in this situation, which makes them more likely to take him seriously.

This also extends to the relationship between Stanley and Mason. While Mason initially treats Stanley as a goofy nerd (which he is, to be fair), the two soon build a camaraderie out of mutual respect. They each see the other act in ways that defy their direct orders because to do otherwise would violate their personal ethics. Over the course of the movie, Mason becomes sort of a father figure to Stanley, pushing him out of his shell–and his high-strung, anxious nature–and showing him that he is more than capable of being a hero. 

This ethos is also what cuts through Bay’s chaotic style, giving the film actual character stakes. Arguably the most exciting action in the movie is a sequence in which Mason goes rogue and Stanley pursues him in a bright yellow Ferrari F355 Spider. This is total wish fulfillment, yes (I would love to drive a Ferrari under the protection of being on assignment from the FBI and not needing to worry about covering the damage with insurance), but moreover, the stakes of the action scene are clear. Yes, Stanley is trying to bring back Mason because he is worried about the population of San Francisco being exterminated by poison gas rockets, but he also seems to care about Mason as a person. This is reinforced by the reveal that Mason’s destination is actually his daughter’s house. That throughline underlines the meaning of the action, and so when Bay is quickly cutting between parts of the car chase, we are taking in the emotional beats of the movement as opposed to the geography. Bay’s style prioritizes the feeling of the action over the sequence of events within. Once Stanley catches up with Mason, the relationship between the two begins to transform, and Mason’s personhood is restored. 

That approach extends to anytime Stanley or anyone else is handling the glass balls that house the VX gas. Bay will use slow motion or unrealistic staging and timing, because the emphasis is on the tension of the moment, not on the actual logistics. That continues with all of Bay’s work, where he emphasizes movement and energy as a way to express those emotions. Yes, sometimes that emotion is “holy shit, wasn’t that awesome?” but those emotions will tie into the character dynamics and themes of the film as much as possible. What I love about Bay as an action director is that he directs every single scene as action, with emotions as close to the surface as possible. Turn off your brain, I suppose, but be sure to open your heart.