This is pure id. Gluttonous, unabashed excess. Every impulse Bay has in his brain put on the screen without a second thought. It’s disgusting, grotesque, hard to look at on so many levels from the frequent cuts to the shaky cam to the garish color palette. Not to mention a camera that so delights in women as sexual objects a 15 year old Megan Fox was famously an extra, not allowed to be at the bar, but allowed to dance soaked. Or the homophobia, or the racist jokes, or the gleeful yet almost innocent disdain for just about everyone. The proudly unabashed hollering of police brutality, corruption, interrogation crossing into torture, and enough militarization to turn LA into a war zone and to successfully siege a stronghold in Cuba, yet not as a defense of these concepts, just because they’re cool, it has not a single thought about the real world. It reflects it and reveals its absurd grossness more than any funhouse mirror, but it does not presume to judge. It instead lavishes in it.

And the worst part is at times it works. That car chase scene is so over the top and wild it still hits. And the whole movie is undeniably an experience, a director putting all of himself and his artistry and ideas on the screen. I was almost tempted to give it more because on some level it is singular. I hate Bay so much. I think everyone should maybe see this movie? Two and a half hours of pure sleaze and grime and 2000s commercials energy.