News

Michael Bay to Blow Up Intimate Character Study

Michael Bay may pack up his TNT after Transformers 2 in exchange for a script that focuses more on feelings than fireballs.
By  · Published on April 20th, 2009

We might finally be able to judge Michael Bay as a director. After years of delivering giant explosions, even bigger fucking robots and plots that have to do more with getting characters into car chases than exploring who those characters are – Bay wants to direct a small character study based off of the real-life story of some body-building juicers that get mixed up in kidnapping and extortion.

According to those crazy bastards over at /film, Bay is interested in directing Pain & Gain (which may not be the final title), a film that promises to have some explosive character development and pulse-pounding inter-personal dramatics.

From the tag sub-header of the original news article:

They were local bodybuilders with a penchant for steroids, strippers and quick cash. And they became expert in the use of a peculiar motivational tool: torture.

Sounds awesome to me. Although, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the words “bodybuilders” and “penchant” in the same sentence before.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with Bay’s current corpus of work – he’s made his mark with a particular style (as opposed to substance), and he’s made a lot of film fans happy doing it. More power to him. And more power to him for heading out into terrain where his abilities as a visual artist won’t be bolstered by several hundred pounds of C4. Hopefully, he’ll be able to pull of a dynamite flick without being able to hide behind CGI and explosions.

It would be exciting to see what the man is made of.

What do you think? Can Bay pull something like this off?

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Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.