It has been a good half-year or so for prominent American directors giving their takes on John Carpenter movies. David Robert Mitchell gave us a spin on “Halloween” and “Christine” in “It Follows,” Quentin Tarantino brought the sublimated racial tensions of “The Thing” violently to the fore in “The Hateful Eight,” and now Michael Bay has given us his version of “Assault On Precinct 13” in “13 Hours.”

The film acts as a fictional retelling of the real life attack on an American embassy in Libya, as told by Michael Zuckoff and Annex Security Team in the book of the same name. Jack Silva (John Krasinski of “The Office” fame) returns to his life as a mercenary, joining old teammate Tyrone Woods (James Badge Dale) and his new team at a CIA compound in Benghazi. Silva is back in the game partly to raise funds for his expanding family and mounting bills, partly because he misses the action. Crisis ensues when militants attack a local diplomatic outpost, killing a U.S. ambassador and turning the next 13 hours into a siege on the team and the CIA personnel they were assigned to protect.

As one might expect of a Michael Bay Benghazi film, the film is astoundingly racist and cheerfully panders to the basest instincts of Tea Partiers everywhere. Despite this, it also contains some of the finest work of Bay’s career, with some utterly breathtaking sequences to equal the best action filmmaking of the past decade or so, and a strong follow-up to the gross, fascinating, underappreciated mess that was “Transformers: Age of Extinction.”

Working with cinematographer Dion Beebe (Michael Mann’s collaborator on the equally underappreciated “Miami Vice” remake from 2008), Bay throws out a jaw-dropping barrage of set pieces: an all-time-greatest car chase in which we are spent spinning amidst the punch and crunch of bullets on bulletproof glass, strobing lights flashing on actor Demetrius Grosse’s screaming face, a tracking shot following a CGI mortar as it is launched and finds its target, a direct quotation from, of all things, Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” an assault on the team’s CIA base by militants rising from out of the fog-covered ground of “Zombieland,” the local neighboring sheep farm, amidst fluttering, ghostly white canvas. To watch “13 Hours” is to watch a director surpass himself, and it was absolutely thrilling.

Even the disgusting racial dog whistles and dehumanization of the Libyan combatants is interesting, in the way it interfaces with Bay’s cribbing from video game visual storytelling. He explicitly likens them to zombies, and structures the siege on the CIA base after Horde modes in games like “Gears of War” and “Call of Duty” (the latter of which we see the team playing in their off time prior to the attack): wave after wave of enemies increasing in numbers and difficulty, all with POV shots from down the iron sights of various weapons and “Grand Theft Auto”-esque bouncing RPGs sprinkled throughout.

Three points should be noted here. First, that Bay has been taking notes from Paul W.S. Anderson. Second, that Bay is smart enough to leave the link between video games and military recruitment strategies, profiteering and propaganda implicit (just in case you ever wondered whether he or Hideo Kojima were the more subtle storyteller, now you know). Third, that there is nothing going on here that the past 15 some-odd years of actual zombie media, spearheaded by the likes of the equally vile and significantly more boring “The Walking Dead,” has not been doing already. The pseudo-libertarian spank fantasy most nerd media politely hides behind the

shambling dead Bay cheerfully admits upfront. One gets the image of Bay as the jock at the nerd Halloween party, Budweiser in hand, looking around slightly baffled and asking “Wait, but we’re all actually talking about brown people, right,” and everyone coughing uneasily.

Bay’s use of the cinematic grammar usually reserved solely on members of the U.S. armed forces in application to men who are, to put it plainly, mercenaries who voluntarily sign up to murder people for money; his break-up with the US military resulting in a (unsuccessful) reach for some kind of apolitical idea of masculine bad-assery; the astounding one-ups-manship of “Sicario’s” night vision assault sequence; the “Saving Private Ryan”/”Black Hawk Down” gore of the last half hour, in which the visceral (in the most literal sense) physical consequences of Bayhem are dealt with for perhaps the first time in his career. “13 Hours” is a difficult movie to recommend to anyone with a functioning set of morals, but it is a visual tour de force by a director at the peak of his powers with enough going on to make giving it your time worthwhile.