Wiki says budget for the film was $50 million. Was filmed in Malta (sets) and Morocco. That'd be the smallest budget for a Bay film in years!Pain & Gain cost way less then that even.
Micheal Bay, as an "artist", is hard to pin down. I really do think that he wants some semblance of artistic credibility, or at least respect for his films. But he's incapable of not making (what he believes to be) mass market pandering fare that's high on violence and poor taste in general.
I really do think he could have been a great 2nd unit action director, the guy who gets called in to do the
explodey stuff only for bigger films while the "real" director takes credit for all the boring, talky bits and the rest of the film in general. But the guy is more self-indulgent than dang near any other director you can name, and his extremely poor taste in damn near everything (comedy, acting, music, sex and racial politics, politics in general, belief in Mark Whalberg's ability to play a Southerner...) tends to ruin whatever surface pleasures his films can muster.
I hate the shit out of his films, but I do respect him, in a weird way. He really wants to 'mature' and make films that can seemingly be taken seriously (why else do anything but the world conquering Transformers films), but try as he might (and he does) he can't or won't break his limitations. The guy really is an auteur though, he's just a really crappy one.
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