Pain & Gain (2013)
Average Rating: 5.4/10
Reviews Counted: 132
Fresh: 61 | Rotten: 71
It may be his most thought-provoking film to date, but Michael Bay's Pain & Gain ultimately loses its satirical edge in a stylized flurry of violent spectacle.
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Critic Reviews: 40
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 21
It may be his most thought-provoking film to date, but Michael Bay's Pain & Gain ultimately loses its satirical edge in a stylized flurry of violent spectacle.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 31,342
My Rating
Movie Info
From acclaimed director Michael Bay comes "Pain and Gain," a new action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie. Based on the unbelievable true story of a group of personal trainers in 1990s Miami who, in pursuit of the American Dream, get caught up in a criminal enterprise that goes horribly wrong. (c) Official Site
Cast
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Mark Wahlberg
Daniel Lugo -
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
Paul Doyle -
Anthony Mackie
Adrian Doorbal -
Ed Harris
Ed Du Bois -
Rob Corddry
John Mese -
Bar Paly
Sorina Luminita -
Tony Shalhoub
Victor Kershaw -
Ken Jeong
Jonny Wu -
Yolanthe Cabau van Kasber...
Barbara -
Rebel Wilson
Robin Peck -
Michael Rispoli
Frank Griga -
Keili Lefkowitz
Krisztina Furton
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Pain & Gain Trailer & Photos
All Critics (132) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (61) | Rotten (71)
In between scenes of the muscleheads torturing their victim, Bay indulges his taste for treating women as sluts and grisly brutality as a nifty excuse for a cheap laugh.
I strongly recommend [it] if you don't overvalue taste, subtlety, and moral decency. I liked it.
Now [Bay] hits new levels of both artistry and sleaziness in the black comedy Pain & Gain, which I strongly recommend if you don't overvalue taste, subtlety, and moral decency. I liked it.
This crude and ugly entertainment is as crass as everything this depressingly successful filmmaker has done.
It's official. Michael Bay, director of the Transformers clobberfests, knows how to make movies about humans, too. The problem is, he thinks humans are robots.
It may be the best movie Michael Bay's ever made. And suggests that, if you just kept his toys put away a little longer, someday he might even make a better one.
Pain & Gain is a shockingly amoral movie yet occasionally rambunctious enough to make viewers overlook that.
His characters are aggravatingly idiotic, the mood is belligerent, and the pacing is erratic. But worst of all is the humor. Bay may be the least funny director alive.
Covered in an impenetrable layer of irony that evinces the smuggest imaginable contempt for the characters.
Why Michael Bay tried to make a dark comedy out of a heinous true crime is beyond me.
While I will always hate Bay, this is actually an okay movie.
Bay applies his action-on-steroids style to a movie about guys actually demented from doing too many steroids, taking his cinematic excesses to the next level.
A dark comedy about muscles, murder, and the American dream.
Bay could've paid for Pain & Gain with the spare hundreds he keeps around for cocaine straws.
Not able to get out of the way of a promising movie, Michael Bay, with the apparent support of scripters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, smothers the project in the sort of juvenile hijinks we had hoped he would skip this time around.
In this quirky, chaotic, dunderhead comedy caper, too much pain is inflicted for very little gain.
Full of great performances, and, sometimes, is amazingly compelling.
With its over the top beefcake humor and featuring Dwayne Johnson's most impressive acting to date, Pain & Gain is so much fun because it's so crass and so ludicrous.
[Casts] the fictional approximations of the real-life victims as somehow deserving their fate in an effort to create sympathy for its three bumbling anti-heroes. In other words it's an insult to true stories.
an R-rated, steroid-fueled Looney Tunes cartoon
You won't forget it easily; it just needs to find a better way to make its surprisingly pertinent points.
Watching Pain & Gain is like having a stand-up comedian scream his entire act right into your year. After a while, it just becomes obnoxious and oppressive.
At least when Moe hit Curly in the head with a hammer it wasn't the re-creation of a real crime.
Audience Reviews for Pain & Gain
Super Reviewer
In what must be seen as the roles The Rock and Marky Mark were born to play, "Pain & Gain" is the "true story" of three halfwit body builders, Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) who hatch a scheme to extort a wealthy gym member, in order to move up in the financial world. But obviously things go horribly wrong, or else there would be no movie. OK, so even though the premise probably doesn't grab you, the satirical nature of this Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely script should have been the catalyst which pushed "Pain & Gain" from a wait for DVD recommendation to a worth the price of admission recommendation. But, as you can probably tell from my rating, though there is some entertainment value here, Bay does such a horrid job of riding the line between dark-comedy and action, which results in audiences spending so much of the first act attempting to become tonally acclimated to what is on screen, that when "Pain & Gain" transitions into the meat of the story, this action/comedy will surprisingly become rather dull.
Side Note: Usually popular Hollywood comedies nowadays go down one of two roads: The Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson comedic road, where two middle aged best buddies spend the film hanging out with teenagers, in order to emphasize how out of touch they are. Or the more action-comedy road, which still uses that same comedic buddy element, but puts a stronger emphasis on many sequences of action; i.e. "Bad Boys" or "Rush Hour". Now while, in my opinion, it doesn't take a director with any unique visual aesthetic to direct these types of films, it takes a director with a special tonal understanding to direct a dark-comedy. "Pain & Gain" is a dark comedy above all else. And therein lies the problem, since Bay has never been known as a director with a tonal understanding. If you don't believe me, just watch "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" again.
But just when I was about to totally give up on this film (much like I did with "Oblivion") after a very hit and miss initial 90 minutes Bay wakes up, allowing the final 40 minutes to be more hit than miss. Furthermore, there is a sequence within this final act where Bay moves the camera effortlessly back and forth between two rooms of one house, contrasting a comedic atmosphere in one and rather violent action atmosphere in the other. This may not only be his best camera work ever, but also the only point in "Pain & Gain" where he truly captures the balance necessary for a film like this to succeed. Bay isn't a bad director, as much as the arthouse crowds will argue otherwise, but by the time sequences such as these come into play, it is a definite example of too little too late.
Final Thought: If "Pain & Gain" would have been directed by someone like Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven, Magic Mike) or even Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) then I believe it's potential would have not only been reached, but exceeded. But alas, it was directed by Michael Bay, and thus underperforms, truly ending up as one of those movies that audiences should only see if there is nothing else showing.
Written by Markus Robinson, Edited by Nicole I. Ashland
Follow me on Twitter @moviesmarkus
Super Reviewer
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- Paul Doyle: Jesus Christ has blessed me with many gifts. One of them is knocking someone the fuck out!
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- Daniel Lugo: Snatch that Cabbage Patch!
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- Adrian Doorbal: What kind of warehouse did you say your friend had ?
- Daniel Lugo: Just a storage one why?
- Adrian Doorbal: Cause theres a whole lotta homo shit in here... A whole lotta homo shit.
Discussion Forum
| Topic | Last Post | Replies |
|---|---|---|
| Dwayne Johnson deserve a beat down | 1 day ago | 1 |
| I Am Impeccably Ecstatic for This Films Release | 4 days ago | 29 |
| The Three B's of a Micheal Bay movie | 5 days ago | 15 |
| 45% DAMN THAT'S BAD! | 5 days ago | 19 |
| Seems people hate micheal bay... | 7 days ago | 35 |
Latest News on Pain & Gain
April 28, 2013:
Box Office Guru Wrapup: Pain & Gain Tops Wimpy WeekendFor the ninth time in ten tries, Michael Bay saw his latest directorial effort open at number one as...
April 26, 2013:
Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg Talk Pain and GainThe well-muscled duo discusses starring in Michael Bay's latest.
April 25, 2013:
Critics Consensus: Pain & Gain is Visceral But UnevenThis week at the movies, we've got bodybuilding bad guys (Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and...
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Foreign Titles
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- Pain & Gain (UK)










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