Having strip-mined pop culture of all its valiant action heroes,
director Michael Bay
If you recall, bombastic adoration of his main characters —
soldiers in Pearl
Harbor , robots in Transformers,
unpredictable cops in Bad Boys, and
space drillers in Armageddon — is kinda
Bay’s thing. That and his film’s tableaus of hokey hyper-Americana: broken lawn
chairs and kinked beer cans, American flags and dusty boxing gyms, greasy
garages and candy-colored supercars, old ladies in hair salons and
neon-drenched strip clubs. He’s like the Norman Rockwell of the Walmart
generation; his work would look right at home on the wall of your nearest
Applebees.
Bay has always been an easy target of critics. Nothing personal;
I just dislike his movies: the way they’re made, the volume at which they’re
screamed at us, the laser-focused intensity jammed into every single
millisecond. Pain & Gain, though,
stings worse than the others. It’s just so wrong on so many levels. First and
foremost, it cultivates celebrities out of its main characters, cold-blooded
murderers now on Florida ’s
death row. Their tales of kidnapping, extortion, murder and dismemberment are
rendered here in a whiz-bang high-octane thriller with splashes of comedy. It
is the most bone-headedly flawed concept in recent cinema history. Springtime for Hitler was made with
better intentions.
Never before have more wretched human beings been the central
figures of a movie this upbeat, this colorful, or this preposterously misled.
Certainly, movies like Monster or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer asked
us to sympathize with deranged murderers. But those were dramas and they never asked
us to laugh amid the bloodletting. Even Natural
Born Killers — Oliver Stone’s controversial satire of murder and mayhem in
the 20th Century — felt compelled to ugly-up the adoration of its murderous
rock-star leads. In Pain & Gain,
though, Bay continuously glorifies the slapsticky wackiness of his characters’
plights; it’s like an R-rated Looney Tune about evisceration and body disposal.
And even after they’ve chopped up two innocent people, Bay still frames his
stars in that troubling low-angle perspective, as if to suggest the characters
were bigger and mightier than even the screen. Up, up, up the camera looks on
small, small, small men.
The movie is based on a series of articles also titled “Pain and
Gain” from the Miami New Times by
Pete Collins. They are fascinating reads and incredible examples of in-depth
crime reporting. The film’s ultimate flaws can’t be found in Collins’ 1999 writing,
which only further proves how terrible Bay is with story and script, themselves
afterthoughts to spectacle and crude humor. How crude? At one point a character
is barbecuing the fingerprints off the hacked-off hands of a dead innocent
woman and Bay turns it into a punch line. These gags aspire to be black comedy,
but the overall tone is too light, too hallow and too insensitive. And
Walhberg’s hushed exasperation plays no different than his demeanor in Ted or The Other Guys, comedies without … oh, I don’t know … grisly
murders with horse tranquilizers and a set of free weights.
The articles and the film revolve around the Sun Gym Gang, a
group of bodybuilders who preyed on wealthy businessmen in the Miami area. The leader is
Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a charismatic and narrow-minded beefcake whose
pantry at home is filled with big jugs of powdered protein supplements. Lugo attends one of those
get-rich-quick seminars and decides he wants to be a “doer, not a don’t-er”;
the first order of business is a kidnapping and extortion scheme. His mark is a
rich gym member and Schlotzsky’s franchise owner, Victor Kershaw (Tony
Shalhoub), who flaunts his cash and says arrogant stuff like, “You know who
invented salad? Poor people.”
Lugo and some iron-pumping buddies (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony
Mackie) kidnap Kershaw and force him to sign away all his property and cars,
divulge all his bank account numbers and spill his secrets for the Sun Gym Gang
to pick through condescendingly. This happens over a month, and it involves
torture, beatings, humiliation and a rather discouraging scene where they melt
his hand in an iron press. The movie frames all this like it’s some kind of
wacky Adam Sandler comedy, but keep in mind that Kershaw’s only crime at this
point was being a tremendous jerk, which must be a terrible offense in the
surreal fantasyland Michael
Bay
Eventually, Kershaw’s usefulness drained, the gang attempts to
kill him, but the poor guy just refuses to die. He ends up surviving and
initiating an investigation into the Sun Gym Gang’s bumbling criminal
enterprise. Ed Harris turns up later as wise private detective Ed Du Bois, who
takes on Kershaw’s case after the Miami Police Department finds it too
ludicrous to believe. Du Bois features prominently in Collins’ reporting and I wished
the film was shot entirely from his point of view simply because he has sound intentions
and Harris serves as the only guy worth cheering on. The female characters have
it especially hard, though. The only ones in the movie are hookers,
prostitutes, bikini babes at the gym and Rebel Wilson, who apparently thinks
about dicks all day long. Du Bois’ wife does have a small role baking a cherry
pie. So let’s review: women in Bay’s world are either strippers, nymphomaniacs
or homemakers. Lovely.
With women in the gyrating in the background, most of the film
follows Lugo and his cohorts as they bop around Miami screwing up crime
after crime. The film makes some twists and turns, but eventually some of them
end up on death row after they murder a phone-sex magnate and his girlfriend.
These scenes are deftly filmed, like a backhoe repairing a Swiss timepiece. At
one point Ludo has to take a chainsaw back to the store because he got hair and
scalp caught in the chain during the dismemberment. The film actually begs us
to feel sorry for him as he deals with Home Depot’s complicated return policy.
It’s a despicable sequence, like much of the movie.
I will say this, Pain &
Gain looks rather fantastic. But all Bay movies do. Every frame could be a
postcard; every sequence a TV commercial. Even the lackluster scenes are
visually unique, including one with Lugo
and his crew inexplicably counting their haul in a tanning bed, black light
soaking into every purplish pore. Bay is a self-plagiarist, though, and many
shots seem borrowed from other Bay movies, including that hair salon, with its
row of old ladies with their heads in dryers, that last turned up Bad Boys.
He also uses small cameras, probably just high-end GoPro cameras,
in locations that larger cameras won’t fit. The idea is nifty, but the cameras
have a grainy and noisy look to them, which creates a jarring transition when
the film cuts from shot to shot. Overall, though, this is one of Bay’s slickest
productions. It’s more visually comprehensible than a movie like Transformers 2, which cut between so
many different cameras it was hard to tell what was going on. Bay even uses
narration from practically every character to ensure everyone’s motives are
kept in check. The narration device worked best in Martin Scorsese’s Casino, though it still has some value
here as characters, major and minor, narrate their drama. It has the added
bonus of enhancing the storytelling, as vile as it all is.
All in all, Bay should be proud of the look of the film. It’s
just the tone and delivery of the story that was unsettling. Somewhere out in
the world right now are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends of the
Sun Gym Gang’s victims, and I doubt they would find Pain & Gain’s lighthearted thrills and hero worshipping worthy
of a giggle, especially considering that Bay directs the movie as if it were a
big-budget date movie. Correction: a big-budget date movie about cold-blooded
murderers on death row. Bay is simply not skilled enough as a storyteller to
frame a movie from the criminals’ point of view. Quentin Tarantino did it with Reservoir Dogs. Michael Mann did it with
Heat. Arthur Penn certainly did it
with Bonnie & Clyde, whose “heroes”
are gunned down in an opera of violence at the end. Bay just doesn’t have the
chops to duplicate the feat.
Films can challenge us. They can make us laugh. They can move us.
They can startle and shock us. An above-average movie will do these things, but
never needlessly. And occasionally they’ll offer some subtext. Pain & Gain’s subtext is rather
straightforward: here are some killers, let’s laugh at them as they kill.
That’s not filmmaking; it’s exploitation of a pathetic order.
Thanks, but no thanks.
