I appreciate your well worded response, but I disagree. I can't speak on Justin Lin, because I've never seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, but Bay certainly knows how to frame and construct a shot - though his shots are sometimes very complicated and that can sometimes work to his detriment. A perfect example of how Bay frames a shot would be Pearl Harbor (2001); though an atrocious film, there is a scene where Naval officers are running out of a building, looking at the oncoming Japanese zeroes in the sky. Now, if the officers were looking straight up or back at the planes passing them overhead, then what you said would be correct. But the Naval officers are looking up and forward, suggesting that more Japanese zeroes are incoming - making the frame more epic just by the direction the actors are staring. I do concede that Bay would be better (from an artistic standpoint) doing commercials, where his visual excess would probably be more appreciated. Again, I'm not calling him an auteur, genius, or a savant, but to say the man lacks any cinematic talent, I think would be unfair.
I do think the degree of their complication works to their detriment and that "complicated" is the perfect descriptor, rather than "complex." There are some nice shots in all of his films, because almost no one who has any practice is capable of making a movie entirely composed of bad shots and Bay's movies have such a dramatically higher total number of shots and lower average-shot-length than the vast majority of movies, you're almost talking about a stopped clock being right twice a day. Out of 2,500 shots, having even 50 that are positively noteworthy is a pretty tremendous failure. In the vast majority of his shots, there's so much business and visual noise going on at once, they're so compositionally cluttered, that your eye isn't directed to an intended specific area of interest, his shots rarely have a "point" and by trying to convey everything at once, they convey nothing.
More importantly, and key to why I think he's a simple-minded-to-the-point-of-idiocy director: all of his shots are undifferentiated and equally "epic" and "cool." Nothing is ever functional, nothing ever serves just its own narrative purpose. Storytelling involves operating in a number of different modes, having peaks and valleys, moments of build-up, tension, excitement, release, relief, etc. and your filmmaking should reflect that. Typically you stay wider and hold longer on the scene-setting at the top and move in closer and pick up the pace as things build and get more important, subconsciously signaling to the audience where their attention should be, how they should feel. Bay only operates in one mode: "This is ****ing awesome!" all of the time for everything. He doesn't understand the difference between how to direct a scene about character development or a couple quarreling or a sad, quiet death versus the climactic action set piece. A minor character going through their mundane routine just pulling their keys out of their pocket to unlock their front door prior to the inciting incident is directed with the same oppressively extreme style -- a jib up, rapid dolly in, extreme close-ups, 5 shots a second -- as a freeway chase at the end of the second act.
You should
direct the audience's attention to what is most important but with Bay's one-size-fits-all style everything is given the same weight and meaning, which renders it all weightless and meaningless. It's relentless sensory overload that results in fatigue and exhaustion.
It's not that I think he lacks any cinematic talent, he has a fairly distinct style and I'd even call him an auteur, it's that I think he's atrocious as a narrative director and making feature films is not where he belongs. The talents he does certainly have which would make him the king of commercials and generic music videos are limited in their effect and not a good fit for movies.