6 of the best. Well Bay's best...

It must be unfathomably weird to be Michael Bay. Imagine waking up every morning, looking in the mirror and being confronted by simultaneously one of the most prolific profit generators in the game and one of the most universally derided directors still making films in the modern era. Seriously, that man shits out blockbusting money-spinners without even breaking a sweat, even if the output is often closer in quality to a freshly squeezed turd than anything else.

Recent years have been demonstrably worse with things like the Transformers franchise disappearing so far up its own exhaust pipe that only surgically removing Bay from the Director's chair and allowing someone a bit more talented at storytelling to take over Bumblebee saved us from more utterly nonsensical drivel. He still gets his producer credit, but I suspect that's just because he part own the production company, publishing rights or licence. Nobody ever said he wasn't smart.

It seems however, that you can't keep a good hack down and Netflix found themselves drawn, moth-like, to his apparent super power of turning absolute dross into billions of little bits of folding money and let 6 Underground loose on a by now, not-so-unsuspecting public. If you are under any confusion as to what you might be about to get walking into a Bay movie then you probably haven't seen one; therein lies the genius because at its heart 6 Underground is the absolutely quintessential Bay Flick and it is, on those terms at least, completely perfect.

With his background in filming inanimate and nearly inanimate objects at dusk (car commercials and music videos respectively) what Bay struggles with is characters. Guns he can do, explosions he excels at and making cars look impossibly sleek is seemingly woven into his DNA. He likes his spinning-round-the-hero dolly shot, and he found some sort of arcane way to make Megan Fox as greasy as the engines she was cluelessly furtling around in. He just can't do characters. He can do broad stroke stereotypes just fine, but anything actually approaching an arc or some sort of emotional or personal growth, not so much. And that's where Ryan Reynolds and the guys who wrote Deadpool come in.

6 Underground is the familiar tale of a billionaire philanthropist who fakes his own death, assembles a crack team of assassins, thieves, gangsters and military bad-asses, fakes all their deaths and then fully decides to overthrow a random Middle Eastern/Eastern European (I forget which stereotypical bad guys they opted for but it really isn't important) dictatorship. Everyone has a number, their own special talent and aren't supposed to share names... and that's basically all the characterisation you get or actually need. Everyone does get a little flashback to show how they got there but honestly that's it. That is exactly the level Bay can handle and we're back to explosions and parkour and car chases and everything is right with the world.

Let's be honest for a moment: it is spectacular toss. Ryan Reynolds is in very severe danger of falling into Johnny Depp territory and just playing himself/Deadpool in everything. This is not a nuanced performance, this is Reynolds using his considerable wit to one-liner his way through absolutely everything. We don't ever find out where he gets his considerable combat skills from but meh, who cares right? One liners! In fact, the majority of interactions between the good guys basically read like teenage social media conversations where everyone talks in memes, catchprases and insults. The first 20 minutes is one giant car chase round Italy and I'm not even sure why they were doing it. The final showdown on the boat is preposterous and makes a mockery of everything Physics stands for, but stuff blows up and there are bullets literally everywhere. It's Maximum Bay, and it's glorious.

Look, nobody is expecting you to delve into this movie for any greater meaning. You will learn nothing about yourself other than what you probably already knew about your proclivities towards cars, violence and pithy quips. You will only realise at the end that they absolutely planned for this to have a bajillion sequels where more or less the exact same thing happens but in different locations and you will realise that there was a reason this never made it to a cinema. You might, if you're lucky, and you're looking in the right direction with the right kind of eyes, understand why when this script hit Michael Bay's desk he probably soiled himself right there on the spot and needed a moist towelette an a lie down.