Hulton Archive/Moviepix/Getty ImagesThe term “vulgar auteurism” suits Michael Bay better than almost any other filmmaker. Loosely defined in the early 2010s, it’s more of an approach than it is a movement, describing the concept of taking commercial films generally considered to have little artistic value — big-budget Hollywood action movies, in this case — and analyzing them with the same lens as more highbrow works. When you look at him in this way, Michael Bay is absolutely an auteur: He has a distinctive visual style, as well as themes that pop up again and again in his films. It’s just that his preoccupations happen to be hot chicks, cool quips, flag-waving patriotism, and explosions. Lots of explosions.Maybe that’s why Criterion released not one, but two Michael Bay movies in its early years: Both Armageddon and The Rock joined the collection before Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, for example. (There’s a fun fact for your next movie trivia night.) Of the two Criterion-approved Bay titles, The Rock is the better movie for newbies, in part because it’s got a better script. Both Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin did polish work on the screenplay, adding their distinctive voices to the meat-and-potatoes action plot. As a result, it’s full of witty dialogue — if you’ve ever wanted to hear Nicolas Cage and Tony Todd banter about Elton John just before one of them gets blown away by a rocket launcher, then this is the movie for you. The Rock was also made early in Bay’s career: At this point, he was known as the director of Bad Boys, and not yet the director of Bad Boys 2. Translated, that basically means that Bay’s MTV-influenced directing style had not yet spun off into the delirious excess of his later work, which can play like self-parody at times. (It’s an acquired taste.) By comparison, the action in The Rock, while hard-hitting and violent with a ridiculously high body count, is relatively grounded — at least, as grounded as a movie that blows up both a San Francisco cable car and half of Alcatraz can be. The movie also benefits from two great leads, both of whom can handle both the pithy lines and the tough-guy posturing. Nicolas Cage — then at the height of his action-movie stardom — plays Stanley Godspeed, an FBI chemical-weapons specialist. He’s called in to help when a rogue group of Marines led by disillusioned wartime hero General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) seize Alcatraz Island, taking hostages and bringing in a cache of bright green nerve gas so that everyone knows they’re serious. They want $100 million for the families of military service members who perished in covert operations, and will slaughter all of San Francisco if they don’t get it. The situation becomes so dire that Cage’s bosses have to bring in John Mason (Sean Connery), a former MI6 agent who’s serving time after refusing to reveal the location of a piece of microfiche containing highly classified information that Mason stole from J. Edgar Hoover himself. Mason is the only man who’s ever successfully broken out of Alcatraz, and so now — to paraphrase the film’s awesome tagline — the FBI needs him to break back into “The Rock” before these disgruntled veterans unleash poison gas on the citizens of San Francisco. There’s a fun fan theory that Connery’s character in The Rock is an unofficial nod to the actor’s tenure as James Bond, and Connery brings the same roguish energy to his role as Mason, but this time his cocky attitude and Scottish brogue are accompanied by a close-cropped white beard and crazy firepower. Combined with Cage’s unhinged persona, they make a charming, if combative pair. The clock is ticking, the quips are flying and so are the bullets, and the whole thing is so much fun that it’s easy to forget how brutally cynical it is. Sounds like a Michael Bay movie. The Rock is currently streaming on AMC+.