Bay flails at anti-hero worship with Pain & Gain

Having strip-mined pop culture of all its valiant action heroes, director Michael Bay apparently had no where else to go for more protagonists. Then he found death row. And just like that — snap your fingers — his hero worship has finally backfired on him.

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 calls reality.

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.

Science fiction from here to Oblivion

It’s counterproductive and downright criminal for a science fiction film to lack ambition. Anything less than soaring spectacle on a grand scale is just a waste of all that Space, the endless kind that we all float in, not the literal space from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the theater.

It is for this reason — its profound sense of ambition and imagination — that makes Oblivion a stellar sci-fi picture. In many ways, it’s a straightforward and proto-typical techno-tinted space opera, but then it is hyper-injected with almost every sci-fi theme that we’ve so far discovered. Just look at this laundry list of Oblivion’s future ideas: space travel, sentient technology, alien invasions, memory wipes, cloning, bio-engineering, laser battles, hydro conversion plants, Saturn’s exploration and colonization, apartments in the clouds, hovercrafts, robotic killing machines, sub-orbital space stations, moon physics and Earth’s untimely destruction. And that’s just the quick list. It’s as if Philip K. Dick penned a story with George Jetson during a Daft Punk show.

Certainly some people will find all this sci-fi geekiness to be a bit heavy-handed — “It’s too much muchness,” they might say — even as they are dazzled by its electro-thrills and the stunning vistas of our future planet ravaged by the destruction of the moon, chunks of it crumbling off into the cosmos of beyond. I found all the science fiction to be liberating and intoxicating. I like movies that aren’t afraid to let loose and give us all they got. Too few movies fill us with wonder and awe. That’s why I appreciated The Fifth Element, another movie that had a great deal of silly fun within the sci-fi genre. It knew it was over the top and simply didn’t care.

Oblivion doesn’t much care either. It is more Star Trek than Star Wars or Fifth Element. There are fewer nuts and bolts in its world, which is designed around smooth edges, bubbly domes and see-through panels. Everything is in cool grey-blues, and lit with futuristic fluorescents that seem to cast a damp glow off all the plasticy non-reflective surfaces. It all feels like an Apple product, which is not a slam on either Apple or Oblivion. It’s just all very clean and sterile. It’s here that we meet Jack (Tom Cruise), drone repairman and steward of Earth. He lives in a house that floats in the clouds on a spindly little arm that doesn’t seem strong enough to hold up a tray of fast food. He lives with Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who is his lover and chief radio operator in their two-person “effective team” — we hear that phrase a lot. Victoria has a curious physical feature: her eyes are always dilated. Jack’s job is to ensure hundreds of hovering robotic security drones are in tip-top shape; the drones guard these giant water plants that are vacuuming up the oceans. Victoria’s job is to monitor his security when he’s out in the field. They are the last two humans on the planet, and in two weeks, when they depart for Saturn’s moon, the planet will be empty.

Much of the pre-story is told by Jack in an opening narration: The year is 2077. Earth is a wasteland. An alien race blew up the moon and it sent Earth’s oceans and tectonic plates into a cataclysmic mambo of devastation. Then there was an invasion. The aliens, called scavs, were defeated, but Earth had to be evacuated anyway. Now it’s just Jack and Victoria and a massive command center called Tet that maintains a steady orbit above them. The movie has many secrets, and I dare not spoil any of them for you, so I will stop there in discussing the plot further. Know this, though: the secrets start spilling mid-movie and then persistently gush onto the screen right up until the end. I found myself continuously surprised at where Oblivion was taking me and why.

The film, based on a yet-to-be-published graphic novel co-written by the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, is very much filled with classic tech-fueled nerdiness, including zipping space ships, hovering robots, collapsible motorcycles and laser pistols. I found some of the pew-pew shootouts to be a little obnoxious, though they are consistently well choreographed and visually interesting. A shot of Jack dropping through a library roof made me gasp. Just when the action and intensity seem poised to dumb down the tone, though, the film can veer unexpectedly into areas with cerebral undertones. It’s not quite as serious or existential as movies such as Solaris or Moon, but I think Oblivion can rest easy it’s not a mindless action movie. 

Kosinski is certainly a director I plan to start watching more carefully in the future — pun not intended. I thoroughly enjoyed his Tron reboot from 2010 and now here I am again stunned at his vision of the future. I especially enjoyed how lyrical and rhythmic some of his scenes play out; Kosinski has a Michael Mann-like knack for picking appropriate music for his films and then editing at the music’s pace. French shoegaze band M83 does all the music here, and every atmospheric piece is perfect for Oblivion’s vision of future technology and space. The music also gives Cruise — as electric as ever here in a genre he must be quite at home in — a chance to stare out onto the horizon and observe its beauty. Cruise, whose face and body have barely aged in his long career (an appropriate aspect in this film's casting), is a formidable force when the film is in detective mode early on. Less so later on when action scenes are propelling us forward. Riseborough, though, is the acting powerhouse here. You'll view her with skepticism simply because her character seems privy to the film's darkest mysteries, but by the end you'll view her with sadness and pain. 

Back to Kosinski: If the young director, who’s quickly becoming the next J.J. Abrams, does anything wrong here, it’s that he doesn’t justify the look of the world enough. Manhattan sits under 500 feet of rock, yet buildings still stand even as they jut out from cliff faces. How does rock and debris crush a city, yet not topple the Empire State Building? In other locations, largely intact jumbo jets sit in shallow tidepools. At times the setting appears to be thousands of years from now, yet Jack tells us it’s only been 50 years since the Earth was rocked by the moon’s obliteration. The barren wastelands (parts of the movie were filmed in Iceland) look neat, but Oblivion doesn’t explain why the world looks the way it does.

That aside, though,I found Oblivion to be an extraordinary sci-fi movie, and a delightful way to begin what is sure to be a high-energy summer. Lastly, let me encourage you to see the movie in a true IMAX theater; not one of those re-rigged half-sized IMAX screens that some theaters try to pass off to moviegoers. The entire movie — not just certain sequences, such as in The Dark Knight Rises, for instance — fills the giant IMAX screen, and the sound is exceptionally crisp and loud. At one point, I looked down at my clothes and they were vibrating from the film’s thundering sound effects. Sit dead center about halfway up and let that giant picture envelope you. It’s an incredible movie experience. 

Dodger great remembered in tearjerker

The most powerful scene in 42 — and probably one of the most important single scenes you’ll see in theaters this year — also features one of the most vile and despicable characters of recent memory.

Let me set the scene: a black baseball player, the very first in the major leagues, stands at home plate. Behind him stands the opposing team’s general manager, who is spouting every variety of racial hatred imaginable, material that would make Django Unchained whimper. The batter is Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson. The manager is Philadelphia Phillies’ skipper Ben Chapman. Robinson first ignores the dreadful dialogue. Chapman ramps it up, growing more cocky and nastier as his stunt goes unpunished. As the threats reach a boiling point, Robinson’s at-bat ends and we heave a sigh of relief that it’s finally over. But then Robinson comes to bat again. And again. And again. Each time Chapman is there to greet him with more vitriol. It feels like a punch to the gut over and over again.

It’s a punishing sequence, but one that is absolutely crucial in establishing what Jackie Robinson had to overcome to be America’s first black baseball player. Only framed against this ugliness do we see how high he soared. Higher than Chapman. Higher than the Dodgers. Higher than even baseball itself since Robinson is more American hero than sports star.

42 is an exceptional movie, one fit for a legend and icon. It is directed forcefully and with purpose by Brian Helgeland, whose LA Confidential is another cinema treasure. His view of Robinson is one of reverence, but also of historical accuracy with shots of the film that match up perfectly with photographs of the real events. Helgeland, who also wrote the screenplay, stages Robinson as a complex and conflicted figure, one who agonized over his role in baseball and questioned everyone’s motives. “Why me? Why now?” Robinson repeatedly asks Dodger owner Branch Rickey; he never gets a straight answer.

Rickey — played gruffly by Harrison Ford, who seemingly channels Jimmy Stewart and Richard Nixon for his performance — keeps telling his newest player he de-segregated baseball for the money. “Money isn’t black and white. It’s green,” Rickey tells Robinson in an empty stadium with sections marked for “whites only” and “colored.” Team owners are a greedy bunch, so Rickey is probably telling the truth, but then he seems to have a deep trust and confidence in Robinson and it jumbles his intentions. One thing is for sure, in 1947, with racial segregation still fully enrooted in American society, Rickey hired a black baseball player. That player, ignoring his own safety and security, took the field and made history. This is their stories.

The movie plays rather straightforward, so much so that the beginning scenes feel more like a TV movie — no presence, mediocre acting, bad lighting — than a feature film. Then 42’s swing gets stronger and it starts belting homers out of the park. We see Jackie early in his career in the “Negro leagues” with the Kansas City Monarchs. Even at that point, his tolerance for racial segregation is miniscule. He chides a gas station attendant for bathroom privileges: “Maybe we’ll just buy our 99 gallons of gas somewhere else.” A white baseball executive calls him a troublemaker and Rickey responds: “If he were white you’d call that spirit.”

Midseason, Jackie marries Rachel (Nicole Beharie), who must have been a saint to put up with her husband’s plan to party-crash the major leagues. They endure threats, uncomfortable glances and horrible language, but Rachel never waivers her support. She has a lovely scene late in the movie as she walks through her Brooklyn neighborhood catching little updates of Jackie’s game from radios blaring out of windows. Earlier in the film, she’s the only wife allowed to go to spring training; her purpose is to uplift and support her husband, whose hellish days are spent playing baseball with admitted racists.

Although history is paramount, 42 is also an exceptional baseball movie. It doesn’t skimp on the mechanics of the game, and even shows lengthy segments of Robinson on base, where he frightened and teased pitchers with his baserunning pyrotechnics. The film spends a significant amount of time with his teammates — the tolerant and intolerant ones — as they question their roles in the Jackie Robinson story. Some sign a letter denouncing his involvement in Dodger baseball; they find themselves on the trade list. The others ponder Robinson as a player, then defend him, and then finally accept him. A touching sequence shows shortstop Pee Wee Reese throwing his arm around Robinson in the infield. “This is for my family up in those stands, he tells Jackie. “I want them to know what I think of you.”

By the time the movie gets to Ben Chapman’s ignorant tirade, 42 has prepared us for it. Up until that point, it was hard to tell where everyone stood on de-segregated baseball. Some hid their racism. Others flaunted it. Other still hadn’t yet decided either way. Ben Chapman, played expertly and villainously by Alan Tudyk, essentially draws a line in the sand straddling home plate that the Dodgers can’t ignore. His scene is important in the same way that Schindler’s List is important: we must bear witness to some ugly things, if only to recoil at its horror and to understand its meaning in the course of human history.

Jackie Robinson stood at that plate and listened to horror spewing from Chapman’s mouth. In 42, we hear it, too. It’s unforgettably cruel, yet it also serves another purpose: it shows us how high and how far Jackie Robinson soared.

Evil and dead is no way to go through life

There are movies that claim to be horror, and then movies that simply are horror. Evil Dead falls assertively in the latter camp.

After decades of wandering through supernatural gimmicks, increasingly trivial remixes of urban legends, Freddy and Jason ’80s nostalgia, a stream of mediocre remakes from Japan, the found-footage fad and a torturous haul through all those icky torture-porn movies, the horror genre might have just re-discovered its footing and orientation with a remake of a 32-year-old classic that will blow your socks off, fold them up into nice little cotton bundles and then murder them with glee. So what does a back-to-the-basics horror overhaul look like? Gore. Mostly just raw, unfiltered gore broadcast at a startling volume and frequency. Oh, and it’s also kinda funny. More on that later.

The setup doesn’t veer too far from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead from 1981: five friends meet at a remote cabin in the woods for a weekend vacation. Underneath the floorboards they discover a book bound in human flesh — a Necronomicon-like graphic novel called the Book of the Dead — that unleashes a demonic spirit that terrorizes the cabin and its inhabitants. The book is found wrapped in plastic and barbed wire, and underneath several litters of strangled and mummified cats. The whole time the book is being unwrapped, with rusty wire cutters no less, I kept thinking, "Shoulda brought a Kindle." The updated movie involves characters David, Eric, Mia, Olivia and Natalie. The first letters of their names spell “DEMON,” which is, all by itself, a big woven basket full of “nope.” The only more appropriate character names for a horror movie this legit would be Franky, Ursula, Uma, Ulrich, Ulysses, Ulla, Upton, Umberto, Charlie and Karen.

The earlier version of this film was mostly an experiment in horror filmmaking, with Raimi (Spider-Man) and star/legend Bruce Campbell improvising their way through effects shots and home-made gore machines. If I remember the lore correctly, they even hammered two-by-fours together to create a Steadicam system; it was very much a low-budget, guerrilla-style movie. This new one — produced by Raimi and Campbell, but directed by Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez — has some spit and polish and generally looks terrific, especially those dreadful shots of low-lying mist flooding over the cabin as the DEMON collective gets settled in for a long, violent night of face scraping, knife licking and OSHA-not-approved carpentry. 

Evil Dead is the best horror movie I’ve seen since the marvelous claustrophobic nightmare The Descent from 2005. It’s certainly the goriest since Peter Jackson’s comically gruesome Dead Alive from 1992. As soon as that barbed-wire wrapped book is opened and read aloud — in creepy Latin — the gloves come off and Evil Dead promptly bombards the screen with one horrifying stunt after another, each more wince-worthy than the one before it. By the end, it is raining blood. Literally. Before that, needles are jammed into faces, nails into kneecaps, broken mirrors into cheekbones and electric meat carvers into forearms. It’s a relentlessly visceral stream of blood, guts and gore that is not for the faint, squeamish or queasy.

Though the spectacular violence and carnage will certainly appease the gorehounds and horror fans, the real terror of Evil Dead is in its main villain, a demonic spirit that can inhabit any infected body, living or dead, in the rustic weapon-filled cabin. The always-on threat of Exorcist-style possession creates an undulating schism of terror quivering beneath the shock and awe of Evil Dead’s most chilling moments: at any second a friend, sibling or significant other can be lunging at your face for a deadly nibble. Or maybe just carving some extra weight off their side with a kitchen utensil — these demons, such creatures of habit. Most of the characters aren't just killed off either; they often have several stages of injury, mutilation and then finally death, only to pop back up and inflict more damage on the remaining cast. Poor Eric, the school teacher who reads the book's blood-scrawled pages aloud, has so many injuries that he starts laughing when new ones are inflicted.

All of this is appropriately scary and terrifying, but like the first Evil Dead — and its sequels Evil Dead II and the slapsticky Army of Darkness, or even Raimi’s super-hilarious Drag Me To Hell — this movie has a sense of humor as dark as the thrills. Some of the humor resides in the matter-of-fact staging of the violence, which is so over the top that you have to marvel (and recoil) at its unblinkingly ironic presentation. For instance, the repeated shots of characters using duct tape to bandage up deep lacerations or on a stump where an arm once was. Mostly, though, I laughed at the imagery, especially of the possessed woman — the M in DEMON — who cackles and gloats from beneath a trap door, her blistery smile beaming from behind a curtain of chains keeping her locked in the cabin's depths. She’s the film’s mad court jester and when she wasn’t puking demon spore into the other characters I found her to be a jolly little imp. And proving at how adept the movie is at humor, and plot twists, this vile witch eventually becomes the ultimate heroine. Now there’s a laugh.

Evil Dead couldn’t have come at a better time for the horror genre, which has been quietly dissolving from the screen for a number of years. Most studios have stopped even trying to make decent frightening movies because horror fans will pay to see bad ones just as much as good ones; “Why bother put any effort in?” a producer said after each new Saw film. Last year’s meta-horror Cabin in the Woods — a movie that didn't entirely win me over, but I applauded for its efforts — certainly set the tone for a renewed interest in the genre, so I hope Evil Dead continues the trend of inventive horror offerings. Though I kind of hope that the next movie, like the original series, gets sillier as it progresses. 

Evil Dead enters the world already a step ahead of other horror movies simply because of its story of demonic possession, a theme that rings with clarity in some of cinema’s scariest pictures: The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen and even in a more modern movie such as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, about another doomed cabin in the woods. This new Evil Dead works on the same levels as those films because it involves characters confronting these demons even as they reside in the bodies of loved ones. It’s a terrifying idea, and that’s probably why zombies are all the rage right now; the zombie apocalypse also deals with the terror of a loved one trying to use your skull as a cereal bowl. It’s a glorious departure from all the run-and-hide movies such as Friday the 13th and all those Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes that were so ill conceived that most people were cheering on Leatherface and not his innocent victims.

Evil Dead is not the end-all/be-all of the horror genre, though I certainly enjoyed its vaudeville-like performance of gooey thrills and jump-worthy effects. I do think Evil Dead does represent a new age of horror, but now it’s up to the films that come after to continue to frighten us in clever new ways.

And one more thing: stay for the end credits. You won’t want to miss the last bit at all.