30 Years Later, This Michael Bay Action Epic Still Holds Up As His Best Film

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Published Mar 18, 2026, 8:09 AM EDT

Sam Barsanti has written about pop-culture for 10 years, and his work has appeared at The A.V. Club, Primetimer, IGN, and Collider. He has also contributed to the popular daily Hustle newsletter, which covers tech and startup news.

He'll happily talk to anyone about comic book movies (he thinks the MCU peaked with Captain America: The Winter Soldier) and giant robots (he thinks some of the Transformers movies are good), and he canonically exists in The CW's "Arrowverse" series of superhero shows.

Sam is also a published poet and horror writer, and his fiction work has appeared on The No Sleep Podcast.

Choosing a favorite Michael Bay movie is a little like choosing a favorite flavor of Mountain Dew — none are particularly good for you, but they taste okay and help you do backflips on a dirt bike. Hey, sometimes you just need to get extreme. But Michael Bay himself has fond memories of one specific movie, one that taught him how to work with major actors and a big budget: The Rock.

Just Bay’s second movie (after Bad Boys), The Rock put him together with established movie star Nicolas Cage and very established megastar Sean Connery. No offense to Bad Boys’ Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, but neither of them had ever played Indiana Jones’ dad or James Bond. The stakes were higher, with The Rock having a reported budget of $75 million (compared to Bad Boys’ budget being somewhere in the $20 million range), and Bay credits Connery with helping him keep the project together.

How Did Sean Connery Help Michael Bay on ‘The Rock’?

Jon looking at Stanley manipulating tiny green balls filled with toxic gas in The Rock

In an old interview with Fandango, Bay said that he was nervous to work with Connery — even after working with major celebrities in his previous career as a music video and commercial director. Connery plays a roguish villain in The Rock, and Bay was intimidated about giving him his first direction (which was to do a scene “a little less charming”), but Connery’s response was, simply, “sure, boy.”

Bay also went on to say that, while filming Bad Boys, they had no money and no time to make sure they were getting things right, so his impulse was to treat The Rock the same way even though he had a lot more money. He credits Connery, “a consummate actor,” with teaching him how to slow things down and actually rehearse a scene with the actors so they all knew what they were doing. So, whenever Bay is working with “young whippersnapper actors that are late or this or that or not focused” (he didn’t name names, but we’re all thinking of the same guy, right?), he’ll tell them about working with Sean Connery. The fact that Bay’s career has steadily gotten bigger and bigger, with bigger movies and bigger actors, likely means that the lessons he learned paid off.

‘The Rock’ Is Still Michael Bay’s Best Movie

In The Rock, a group of rogue Marines led by Ed Harris steal a bunch of rockets loaded with chemical weapons and capture Alcatraz. They threaten to launch them at San Francisco unless the U.S. government admits to covering up details about how it mistreated Harris and his men. The FBI enlists chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Cage) to sneak onto Alcatraz and disable the rockets, but because nobody knows the secret underground tunnels of the former prison, the organization also has to bring in John Mason (Connery), a former British special agent who was once imprisoned on Alcatraz but managed to escape. (The meta-joke is that Connery is literally playing old James Bond.)

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Cage and Connery quickly become friends, with the sort of action-buddy chemistry that Bay is so good at tapping into (whether it’s between the Bad Boys or the Autobots). The movie is sort of a pure form of Michael Bay’s trademark bombast, with just enough restraint to keep it from being a total cartoon, which is a trap that nearly every subsequent Bay movie fell into (especially Bad Boys II and later). It also doesn’t make any effort to pretend it’s a more serious movie than it is, like with Bay’s bizarrely conceived 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. If Bad Boys is some early formulation of Mountain Dew where they hadn’t perfected the formula yet, then The Rock is the classic, crowd-pleasing version.