Although Pain & Gain is based on a true story (the opening narration goes, ‘unfortunately, this is a true story’), Bay treats it as though it was some weird The Three Stooges Go on a Crime Spree filtered through a heightened color palette.
Three bodybuilders (Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie) with a dream kidnap a rich but reprehensible jackass (Tony Shalhoub) and ‘persuade’ him to sign over everything he owns to them. When he recognizes one of them, they attempt to kill him – through a comedy of grotesque errors, they fail, but the police don’t believe him (he’s half Jewish/half Colombian and they just think he’s a drug lord on a bender).
When they run out of money, they try the same thing again but, by now, a private detective (Ed Harris) has discovered the ‘unlikable victim’ was telling the truth and the police have one chance to make up for their earlier error.
The film does movie like a bat out hell – whatever his many faults, Bay does know how to pace a film – but the action is frequently as cringeworthy in concept as in its execution and the humor is a kind of bloody slapstick. At one key point a graphic skids across the screen, ‘This is still a true story.’
Performances keep Pain & Gain from being a complete loss: Harris brings a laconic, hard-boiled edge to retired PI, Ed Dubois; Shalhoub is a monumental jackass as unlikable victim Victor Kershaw; Rebel Wilson provides her usual brand of off-kilter humor to Robin Peck – who meets Anthony Mackie’s Adrian Doorbal in a clinic that specializes in erectile dysfunction, and Johnson’s Paul Doyle is a born again Christian with the brains of a gnat – and the only genuinely sympathetic character in the movie(not unlike the doomed Lennie in Of Mice and Men – and I’m sure I won’t be the only critic to make that comparison).
While Wahlberg is adequate as dim-witted ringleader Daniel Lugo, Mackie is surprisingly unfunny as the exercise obsessed Doorbal; it’s the rest of the key cast that keeps the film from being an utter failure.
Without fine performances by Shalhoub, Johnson, Harris and Wilson (who falls for Anthony Mackie’s character), Pain & Gain would be all pain and no gain. With them, it’s a barely tolerable piece of mediocrity – and Bay’s best non-Transformers (the first one, anyway) movie since The Rock (or maybe The Island – I’ve always kinda liked that one).
Since Michael Bay takes the same approach to comedy as he does to action – hit the audience hard enough and long enough and they just might be dazed enough to think they’ve seen a good movie – Pain & Gain almost takes on a surreal enough quality to actually work. Almost.
Final Grade: C-
Photos courtesy Paramount Pictures.