By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: Pain and Gain
PAIN & GAIN (Three Stars)
U.S.: Michael Bay, 2013
Pain & Gain is Michael Bay’s new picture, and, for him it‘s a departure. It’s a big, bright, violent movie, but it’s derived from fact this time, (or at least from allegedly factual newspaper articles). It’s an ugly movie about supposedly beautiful (or at least attractive) people whose avocations are making money and building trim, sexy bodies for their clients and themselves.
These good-looking but amazingly dumb protagonists, played by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie, are professional body-builders and would-be business studs whose role models seem to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump and Mrder, Inc. — plus some strippers and hookers and would-be strippers and hookers. Their story is based, we’re told, “unfortunately“ on a “true story.” That which means it’s a different kettle of clichés than Bay’s Armageddon or his three Transformers movies, lucrative shows that seemed to be loosely based on cocaine-style fantasies and video games and other action movies.
Bay’s pervious pictures, which made him a sort of movie prototype and whipping boy — a huge-grossing Hollywood action-and-effects specialist, but also a favorite target for serious critics — were rock ‘em, sock’ em teen-boy fantasies, about cities exploding and cars crashing and battles in outer space and wars with extraterrestrial robots and other blood-and-guts techno-daydreams of the kind that we‘re supposed to someday out grow, but often don‘t.
. Pain & Gain on the other hand, seems to be Bay’s idea of a low-budget indie, a sort of quasi-realistic drama ripped from real life, and laced with over-exaggerated satire. It’s a daring film in some ways, a movie that tries to present a dark vision of contemporary American society, and even to indulge in some pointed social criticism.
SPOILER ALERT (roll to reveal)
Pain is the half-demented saga of three nincompoop bodybuilders (Wahlberg, Johnson and Mackie), who take over a Miami gym, kidnap a slimy deli mogul (Tony Shalhoub as Victor “Pepe“ Kershaw, try to torture him into signing away his property, try to kill him, are more successful (if still staggeringly inept) in some other capital offenses, and get chased though the sun-assaulted streets of Miami by cops who seem only marginally smarter than they are.
END OF ALERT
Is this entertainment? Well, in some weird way, yes. I was entertained, and even impressed at times, though a savvy movie-going friend at the screening (who prefers The Golden Age) thought it was one of the worst things he’d ever seen. Both of these, I think, are reasonable responses. Pain & Gain, is, at times, entertaining, and at other times, something like one of the worst things you’ve ever seen. What makes it both good and bad, are the viciousness of the story, and the fact that Bay and his writers (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (adapting a series of New Times articles by Pete Collins) don’t supply the kind of moral counterbalance or perspective, you need to be able to laugh at a movie like this with a clear conscience. Or rather, they do have a moral counter-balancing character — Ed Harris as good cop turned private investigator Ed Dubois — and they don’t make good enough use of him. At any rate, Pain & Gain is better than having to watch Shia LaBeouf battling tinker-toys and fighting erector sets in another Transformers movie.
The three stupid body-enhancers played by our stars are Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg),an ex-financial guy who believes in the American Dream (at least as filtered though Ken Jeong’s dopey motivational guru Johnny Wu, whose babbled pseudo-profundities include exhortations to be “doers rather than don‘t-ers“), Paul Doyle (Johnson), an ex-con who thinks he believes in Jesus (but has his teachings somehow confused with the Marquis de Sade‘s), and Adrian Doolbar, an over-worked muscle-motivator who believes in big tits, but who has so over-indulged in anabolic steroids that his penis has shrunk to the size of a small peanut — which matches the size of the brains of Adrian and his two partners-in-botched-crime.
This doltish trio, whose feeble-minded exploits are allegedly torn from life, are all good-looking enough to serve duty as movie muscle guys, but not funny enough (or possessed of a funny enough script) to make the intended dark comedy about them ignite. They are dumb: dumber than (but not as funny as) Dumb and Dumber’s Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels put together and, dumber than the U.S. Congress on voting day, so dumb (in fact) that they make Larry, Moe and Curly look like three slightly rambunctious Nobel Laureates. Pain’s threesome take bodybuilding and idiocy to some new level, a level that divides the audience. Could this possibly be the truth about contemporary America and its obsession with get-rich-quick schemes and the body beautiful? Unfortunately, maybe yes — though it‘s also a movie that often seems to be on steroids.
Wahlberg is one of the few big male movie stars I can think of, who doesn’t tend to overuse his smile, though it could be argued that if he (or his costars) started over-smiling in this show, they’d come off like maniacs. (Then again, they are maniacs.) Similarly, Johnson has been developing such a likable persona in his recent movies that his fall into sin here, is almost disappointing. Mackie, meanwhile is given little to do but mourn his shriveled attribute (or shrunken schlong), and try to compensate with Rebel Wilson’s bounteous presence as girlfriend Robin Peck. The three (or four) are not bad. But Shalhoub is a little too strident as Kershaw, and I agree with other reviewers that the initially-cast Albert Brooks was a better choice for Kershaw. Then again, the Coen Brothers might have been better choices as writer-directors here than Bay and his scribes. And Harris, as mentioned, could have used more screen time.
Pain & Gain actually belongs to one of the great movie comedy sub-genres: the botched-crime yarn. But Bay’s show, unfortunately, is no Ladykillers or Big Deal on Madonna Street — though sometimes this movie‘s frantic, wild-swinging tone reminds you of the Coen Brothers‘ more farcical remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s masterful 1955 Ladykillers. One of the most interesting thing about Pain, as many critics have pointed out, is that Bay and his writers are savaging exactly the kind of attitudes and vision he seemed to be exploiting in most of his other movies. That doesn’t mean he’s paying for all his sins, real or imagined, or that it’s time for him to start adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy or Raymond Chandler. But it does indicate that, in trying for a new kind of audience and response, Bay may eventually start making much more interesting movies, shows that would have brought a smile to the face of John Frankenheimer, although, if this movie does mediocre business, Bay may be urged, strongly, by people with purse-strings, to be a doer, not a don’t-er, and go back to the toy box and the exploding action movie and movies for teen-boys. Unfortunately.
