Crime doesn’t pay. Director Michael Bay goes the distance to remind audiences of that necessary lesson because it also gives him the opportunity to glorify and glamorize every ugly facet of it. Sitting through Pain and Gain, an alleged black comedy that exposes the danger of American greed, I’m left to contend that the writers and actors sought to dig up a fascinatingly dark tale spun so unbelievably from the ground up that 15 percent of it must actually be true. After all—this is a true story. I could have used a newspaper clipping of said story or even a mere tweet. Bay’s punishing drama lasts 130 gruesome minutes.
The story takes place in 1995 where a Miami fitness guru, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a smarmy snake with muscles, slithers his way into a senior position at a gym and manages to triple its membership within a short amount of time. But the cash isn’t green enough, and after a few interactions with self-made titan sleaze Walter Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), Daniel decides he can give the jerk what’s coming to him and steal all of his dough.
To do it, Daniel recruits the bronze mammoth and reformed ex-con Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) and the steroid abuser Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie). Together the odd-trio team attempt a series of failed executions at nabbing Kershaw before finally kidnapping him and then torturing him for three weeks until he signs over all of his finances and possessions to the unorthodox bodybuilders. The gang seals the deal by killing him, or so they think, and Kershaw escapes near death. Held captive in a hospital bed, Kershaw’s repelling personality and lack of convincing evidence regarding his abduction cause the police to laugh off his account of events.
Left broke and broken, Kershaw hires a retired private investigator (Ed Harris) to find the three tank-sized clowns that stole everything from him. It ends up only a matter of time that Daniel and his pals fall victim to the temptations of the wealthy lifestyle and they compromise their plans, setting off a series of idiotic judgments and actions that lead them to further murder and destruction.
Pain and Gain happens to illustrate everything about soulless filmmaking. Despite decent performances from the cast, the script never allows us to care for anyone of these hulking doofuses because they’re all so vile and violent. Wahlberg’s character should carry the story in a tragic fashion, but he’s so unlikable in every conceivable manner, as are the other characters who fall victim to his manipulations. Johnson has the most well-rounded role as the beefy aggressor who has found Christ, only to immediately find the devil in Daniel. Mackie plays the third hand with little of interest added to his character.
When the characters fail, Bay makes sure we feel the pain. His music video-style only glamorizes the violence and depravity. These three men become enforcers of brute punishment, and rather than explore any psychological dimensions of these characters, Bay plays the outrageous blackness of the film for laughs, only they don’t hit as hard as his three leading actors—if ever. Instead the director lights up the screen with oil, sweat, and sunlight and plays his misogynistic melee tale for all its worth, consistently objectifying women and playing up the volatile chumps and their violent ways as something to be desired. From the outset, we don’t understand these characters in any possible way, so why spend 130 slow minutes trying to laugh off their bloody antics? Bay thinks he’s delivered a cautionary tale, but instead his penchant for cinematic destruction provides a herd of antagonist morons doing grotesque things that are meant to look ‘oh so cool’—which reminds me of another one of Bay’s ugly and overlong crap chutes from ten years ago.
Movies based on plays are a tricky proposition for today’s audiences weaned on the theatrical bombast of directors such as Michael Bay, Tony Scott, and the Wachowski Brothers. Not to mention their forebears, the great Lucas and Spielberg. Whereas movies often employ special effects, realistic audio, blaring soundtracks, and a host of other tricks to enhance the viewing experience, plays instead offer, for the most part, only dialog cemented by good ol’fashioned acting. And this is why adapting a play into a movie is a somewhat daunting task for any director, but Ron Howard manages to pull it off quite nicely.