Pain and Gain
★
Dir: Michael Bay
(2013)
Taking a pay cut and probably some light brain surgery in order to deal with an actual story, Hollywood's gung-ho alpha male, Michael Bay finally gets to make his pet project. It must have been such a struggle for the billionaire blockbuster titan as one of our most bankable to-go men to get this thing made, but even so he still dropped about 30 million dollars on this neon injected, blue sky filled, rotting corpse of a crime caper. Shot with his typical soulless music video panache Pain and Gain tells the true story of 3 body builders who kidnap a rich client and try to take him for everything he owns. Never knowing enough about its own irony or chance at satire to be smart or entertaining beyond its gloss, the whole thing finishes as nothing but an oil-drenched bikini-clad moron festival of epic proportions.
Mark Walberg, Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson play three gym junkies who join forces to abduct self-made millionaire Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). But Walberg's money hungry Lugo, Mackie's impotent Dorbal and Johnson's born again Doyle are straight out of the Elmore Leonard school of crime and Greedy, Flacid and Godly proceed to botch every aspect of the kidnapping and torture. Kershaw instantly recognises Lugo and after another huge mistake the three are soon under the watchful eye of Ed Harris' retired P.I.
The majority of the film seems to rely on its bright colours, low angles, breast implants and Bay's infamous up-skirtery to totally massacre what could have been an interestingly exaggerated crime story or even a wild and wonderful documentary. It is strangely the type of oddity of a news story that Errol Morris may have sniffed out to put on the screen to wonderful effect but here it feels like nothing but an excuse for the director to once again fill the screen with his hard-rock testosterone-enhanced musings on the buffed up American dream and a nations pitiful reliance on the lowest form of bumper sticker self-improvement.
Walberg, Mackie and Johnson are all frankly passable in their roles but the sheer gob-smacking idiocy of the world Pain and Gain creates is like watching a 2-year-old child colouring in a line drawing of the stars and stripes. Only way less cute. It feels like half of the film is shot from below the waist looking up, the colours are so bright they hurt your grey matter from frame one and, unsurprisingly, Bay has now completely gotten rid of female characters from his latest film. All that remain in his toy box these days are strippers and fat girls. That's a pretty broad brush you're using there Mr. Bay, why don't you just use a roller?
