Review: Pain & Gain (98% spoiler-free)
I have come to like and admire Michael Bay. He knows who he is as a filmmaker and he does magic tricks that no one else can do.
Does he make great films?
Hasn’t yet.
But he makes very consumable stuff. And there is often real beauty in his high-voltage, high-gloss, smoke and pastel.
Pain & Gain is an attempt at “edgy” and “so dumb it’s intelligent.” And I was rooting for the film to be great and great fun from weeks before I took a seat in the theater it screened in until the end of the film. I opened myself all the way up to every wild idea – however based on truth – and crazy visual in the movie. I love Tony Shalhoub and he was, in many ways, reprising his Men in Black performance – which I loved – here. I’ll take all the Rebel Wilson they can give me. Mark Wahlberg has become a truly great everyman actor. Have always enjoyed The Rock, whatever he was cooking. And Anthony Mackie is always terrific… not sure how he bulked up this much.
So why isn’t the movie great? Or more pointedly… why doesn’t it work?
I feel I should write, “Michael Bay,” but it isn’t a matter of putting this on Bay’s doorstep. His skill set was used and used well. But what was missing was a mad artist. What was missing was an editor who could chop off long, repetitive sections of the film. The film needed shaping from a mind that is as good at leaving things out as putting things in.
Pain & Gain collapses under the weight of its repetition of cool shit. It is a collage that never becomes a full picture.
The comparison that was dead clear to me during the movie was the late, great Tony Scott’s Domino. There is a lot of stuff I LOVE in that movie. Keira Knightley completely got me in that movie. Her romance with Edgar Ramirez gave the comedy some soft romantic edge… one that is completely absent in P&G, though there is a nod to it in the Mackie/Wilson connection. Much of the screaming in the film was fun. The stunts were often insane. Mo’Nique was a glorious racist caricature. (We can get into the fight about whether such a thing exists later.) Rourke was still close enough to this side of the crazy tracks that he was interesting and not a cartoon.
But P&G doesn’t know when to stop. It loves too much of a good thing, a bad thing… really, everything. The first act is fun… until it becomes a Russian novel as read aloud by an idiot.
A classic problem with this film… Dwayne Johnson is quite good in the movie as a 12-stepping, Jesus-loving thug. But (SPOILER… KINDA) when he falls off the wagon, the movie is so busy playing peek-a-boo with Bar Paly’s also-could-have-been-a-star-making-turn Euro-bimbo that it forgets to slow down and make a strong play with the fall of Paul (Rock). This character should have been Oscar bait. He has so many bizarre turns and twists, and Johnson seems absolutely up to the role… but the movie deserts him. There is a bit – which I won’t spoil – in the third act, where this Jesus-guy ends up doing something so outrageous that it gets a big audience laugh… but the movie has neither the time or inclination to slow down and engage with this character as he makes this choice. And there is the difference between Tarantino and an Oscar for Mr. Waltz and Pain & Gain.
Michael Bay has the brain, camera skills, and balls to make this movie a tough as it can be. But he doesn’t have the inclination to slow down and trust the drama.
At 1:40, this would have been a tight little romp of a movie. I’m not sure it would have ever been great, unless they brought in a guy like George Armitage, whose Miami Blues is, in many ways, the indie version of this film. But it’s not… it’s better. Because Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason-Leigh and Fred Ward were special effects enough.
P&G keeps telling us that this is a true story no matter how unbelievable. And it’s a very funny, quirky, crazy story. But it is missing the “Why?” and that is where the soul lives. The closest it gets is Mackie and Wilson, but even that is given too-short shrift.
You know who I loved in the film? (That is, beyond Larry Hankin’s cameo.) Emily Rutherfurd. She plays Mrs. DuBois, wife of Ed Harris’ character. When she in on camera, everything seems to slow down for a normal human emotion… some of the only times in the film.
Anyway…
I was still entertained often by Pain & Gain. A lot of the material is very broad and silly… Three Stooges with buff bods, tans, and epic skies. But I was willing to go there.
What hurt – so much – was that we, as an audience, know a lot about Wahlberg’s character within moments of meeting him. Not only do we get his mindset – the nicely faked “be rich like me, idiots” ads and seminars help – but we know what a screw-up he is, how much smarter he thinks he is than he is, and how distracted from enjoying what he worked so hard for… all clear in an instant. Gotta give Bay and Wahlberg a lot of credit for that. But then, the movie can’t stop telling us what we already know, over and over and over again until it stops being fun and becomes a bit of a chore.
True Romance is probably the best of this small, but distinct genre in post-1980 cinema. And we hoped for a return to that from Domino. And we hoped for it again here. Nope. Too much testosterone.
It’s a confounding movie and I agree. Emily Rutherford is the best thing in it (heck, she’s the best thing in practically everything she does, all the way back to “The Ellen Show”). I liked Ed Harris a lot, too, but it helps that they’re the only two remotely sympathetic characters in it.
Keith Uhlich called Bay a “homophobic, misogynistic, anti-human twat” (in his tweet promoting his review, which was listed on the front page of MCN). I would’ve called him a twit…unless Uhlich knows something we don’t.
(So does that make Bay a lesbian? That would explain so much…)
I would guess Uhlich was using that “t” word in the English or Australian fashion.
Uhlich probably just knows that “twat” is a common epithet, especially in British slang, that basically means “jerk.”
How in the fuck is this his MEN IN BLACK performance?
Domino is a masterpiece, and one of the top 5 movies TS ever directed. It’s all the Tony one could ask for in a Tony Scott movie. The Dargis review says it all.
Bay is, and always will be, a first-rate Tony Scott impersonator.
ditto on Domino; watch it regularly, just watched it last week in fact and listened to the Scott commentary and watched the extras … right now watching Enemy of the State – the three days of the condor of the 90s
I was using it in the “We may run out of Pan Am Coffee, but we’ll never run out of T-W-A-T!” ‘Crimes of Passion’ sense.
Or was I?
Sorry, but “Enemy of the State” is not worthy of steaming open “Three Days of the Condor”‘s mail.
Apropos.
it would be a boring world if everyone liked the same film, just saying Enemy of the State is one of the most prescient films ever made
Sorta favorable (?) review from Slant:
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/pain-and-gain
I’ve been thinking about Keith Uhlich’s comments for a while, and combined with the obvious pandering toward China we see in IRON MAN 3 to present a Mandarin who isn’t the least bit racist or “yellow peril” or at all loyal to his comic book origins, I’m wondering why filmmakers like Bay don’t go all the way and make movies that would pander to both Chinese and white American audiences…
Minstrel shows.
Bay has already shown an affinity for gold-toothed shuck-n-jive numbers in his movies and he clearly doesn’t give a shit about what the critics or tastemakers might say, so why not go all out in pursuit of the money that would pour in from all ends of the racist spectrum? Whites who feel they can’t get far enough away from the inner city would love it, as would the Asian audiences who stay far away from movies with too many blacks and not enough action.
Every episode of the hugely popular Amos ‘n’ Andy radio show is in the public domain so there must be plenty of comedy gold to be mined, and when things get too ridiculous someone could take a break and remake THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Every Stormfront member has surely heard how great the movie is, but it’s not bad enough that it’s black and white–it’s silent! You have to know how to read to know what’s going on!
A remake is long overdue, and anyone who cares more about money than infamy should be eager to take it on.
I think you can find a few people in Hollywood who fit that bill.
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