The outrageous story behind Pain & Gain, Michael Bay's latest flic which surprisingly doesn't feature the destruction of a city, is a great morality tale of what junked-up morons will do when they think they deserve it all. This is a great story of the price of the American Dream and what it takes to achieve, and the movie even acknowledges Scarface and The Godfather as inspirations of people taking what they want.
Michael Bay has made half of a great movie. Unfortunately, its directed by Michael Bay, who never had the touch for deft and subtle storytelling.
Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a fitness guru bored with where he is and wanting to make it better. He enlists the help of another trainer (Anthony Mackie) and a reformed, Jesus loving ex-con (Dwayne Johnson) to kidnap a reach sandwich shop owner (Tony Shalhoub) because, well, he's a douche, and also he isn't committed to keeping his body in peak physical form.
It's a preposterous story that also happens to mostly true, and the cast really sells the material. The only weak link is a Romanian stripper played by Bar Paly, but thats because the script does her no credit. For a woman who got herself to America, she sure is dumb. This is also a black comedy, which works most of the time, though there are a few gratuitous gross-out gags (one involving pubic hair, the other a trip to the bathroom gone wrong). Overall though, there is the foundation in place for a great social satire on the American Dream.
But the script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is one of the laziest screenplays committed to film. The film jumps perspectives like a Game of Thrones novel, and we got long, extended voice overs from each character describing who they are and what they're thinking. Instead of letting us get to know these people, the film tells us who they are up front, and leaves no room for the relationships to be established.
Worse is Bay's style, with candy-saturated images that seem to come with the territory of setting a film in Miami. The frenetic energy is fine for an hour, but the film feels longer then the two hours it is, and you're left exhausted by the end of it (though not as a exhausted as some of Bay's other films). A more appropriate approach may have been to build the frenetic energy of the pace as the film moves along and the crimes the main characters commit become more heinous. Instead, the film starts at one pitch and maintains it throughout.
None of this should come as a shock to anyone. Mr. Bay has destroyed great material before, and why we thought this would be any better is beyond me. I got what I wanted out of Pain & Gain; its completely off the wall, and features of a story stranger then fiction. Unfortunately, Michael Bay made it, though in reality, it kind of is the perfect film for him to make.
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