Pain & Gain (2013)

With the potential of being a satirically brilliant comedy and with the help of great performances and a script that is undoubtedly the funniest of the year, "Pain & Gain" struggles to find its footing behind a big budget director (Michael Bay) who doesn't seem to know how to make a film which isn't predicated on orgies of mindless explosions.

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

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