Pain & Gain Review

Imagine your average Coen brothers crime caper; eccentric characters, check; smart aleck script, most certainly; stupidity, by the bucket-loads. Now imagine it bench-pressed into oblivion and ‘roided up to the nines and you might be approaching the territory Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain occupies.

First and foremost, let’s address the Optimus Prime-shaped elephant in the room. To many, the mere mention of Bay’s name could send the most mild mannered film fanatic into a blind rage for crimes committed against celluloid. With Pain & Gain however, Bay steps into the realms of self-parody following a grotesque posse of hopelessly deluded yet bizarrely enticing characters. ‘Subtlety’ doesn’t register in Bay’s lexicon. Pain & Gain instead insists on bold, brash camera techniques and an almost exclusively fluorescent palette for what is essentially a character driven piece. And it works all the better for it. Now quit your whining and hand over the dumbbells.

A noticeably more hench Mark Wahlberg takes the lead role of Daniel Lugo, an ambitious personal trainer who, seduced by his own skewed version of the American Dream, plans to kidnap one of his affluent clients with the help of his meathead buddies; fellow beefcake Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and ex-convict-born-again-Christian-crackhead Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson). Let’s just repeat that. Dwayne Johnson plays an ex-convict-born-again-Christian-crackhead. His performance is worth the admission price alone. The supporting cast all provide airtight performances, especially Tony Shalhoub who miraculously provides a sympathetic depth to his earl-of-douchbaggery Victor Kershaw.

Pain & Gain works (out). And it works well for one main reason. It invests in its larger-than-life characters and decides to delve into their juiced-up, endearingly stupid world. Bay tows the dangerous line between ridiculing and endorsing the actions of his merry band of buffoons – whether he does this consciously could be a source for great worry, but assuming he is consciously mocking Lugo and co, the film highlights the fools that are generated from such an ideologically charged nation. Incidentally, it probably helps that there aren’t computer rendered intergalactic robots flipping their hubcaps and causing explosions in every other scene.

And so, in all intents and purposes Bay’s smallest scale production since Bad Boys II is also his best. Edited into submission, the film plays out like a pleasurably trashy music video, consequently bucking a recent Hollywood trend of overlong bore-fests by squeezing a behemoth script into a two hour window. It’s deliberately lurid, audacious and surprisingly funny. Go see. Bring a protein shake.

Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely

Director: Michael Bay

Actors: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub, Rebel Wilson, Ed Harris

Release Date: 30th August 2013

Rating: 8/10