Pain & Gain Reviews
Movie Talk
Michael Bay's lurid crime comedy Pain & Gain is as excessively pumped-up as you would imagine, a berserk, overblown action movie on steroids.
We Got This Covered
Pain & Gain is Michael Bay's best film yet, fusing his high-octane and in-your-face directing style with pitch black comedy that makes for the funniest film of 2013.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Ooh Tray
Lugo and his confederates feitishized the human body, were steeped in misogyny, and had scant intelligence, emotional or otherwise. Their story is brought to the screen by Michael Bay.
Birmingham Mail
This is Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson straining every sinew to deliver the heavy duty performance of his career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Irish Times
Might this be the best Michael Bay film ever? We know what you're thinking. But we mean it in a good way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Digital Spy
A movie in which women are either pouting, flesh-baring sluts or morbidly obese figures of mockery with terrible personal hygiene, where rampant homophobia is deemed funny and laddish, and where crude racial stereotyping is acceptable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
TheMovieReport.com
The closest Michael Bay's natural style for flash really feels like an organic extension and expression of the material's narrative and characters rather than mere surface gloss.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Daily Mail [UK]
[Bay] tries to be funny, and it turns out to be even more brutal, loathsome and crude than his previous efforts.
Daily Express
The performances are first class and help make you warm to the lunkheaded trio against your better judgement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Film4
The uneasy blend of comedy and ultra-violence will turn some viewers off but, if you can stomach it, you may find yourself curiously entertained.
Little White Lies
Michael Bay's muscle-bound satire is Bad Boys on 'roids. And that's not a good thing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Financial Times
Forgive me while I weep in despair. Pain and Gain is awful beyond imagining.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0/5
Guardian [UK]
There's something inspired about putting Michael Bay in charge of a brazen action-comedy about gym-pumped knuckleheads who screw up their own criminal masterplan most royally.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Contactmusic.com
Spirited and very funny, this movie should actually be rather disturbing since it's a true story about torture and murder.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daily Telegraph
Along with comedy dismemberings, farcical GBH and the barbecuing of human hands, the movie offers the equally gruesome spectacle of a metaphor being clubbed to death.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
The Skinny
A scabrous satirical swipe at not only the knuckle-headed machismo the director seems so enthralled by, but also at an America crippled by consumerism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Sky Movies
Labelling a Michael Bay movie thoughtful is like calling Transformers cerebral...but this is a lot more stimulating than we've come to expect even if reverts to shoot 'em up type by the end of its pumped up running time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Flick Filosopher
A bleak, bitter, wicked pleasure that holds up the underpinnings of modern America - self-help, Jesus, and violence - for ridicule.
Top CriticThe first hour may be Bay's career high point: it's fast, freaky, gloriously tasteless and startlingly pointed in its attacks on western insecurity, shallowness and greed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
HeyUGuys
Ultimately, cinema is a form of entertainment and this picture does nothing but entertain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
