Pain & Gain Reviews
Tampa Bay Times
Pain & Gain is a shockingly amoral movie yet occasionally rambunctious enough to make viewers overlook that.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Common Sense Media
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
Antagony & Ecstasy
Covered in an impenetrable layer of irony that evinces the smuggest imaginable contempt for the characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
KWQC-TV (Iowa)
Why Michael Bay tried to make a dark comedy out of a heinous true crime is beyond me.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Reno News and Review
While I will always hate Bay, this is actually an okay movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.75/5
Top CriticIn 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0.5/4
Atlantic City Weekly
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Three Movie Buffs
A dark comedy about muscles, murder, and the American dream.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I strongly recommend [it] if you don't overvalue taste, subtlety, and moral decency. I liked it.
Houston Press
Bay could've paid for Pain & Gain with the spare hundreds he keeps around for cocaine straws.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Creative Loafing
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
SSG Syndicate
In this quirky, chaotic, dunderhead comedy caper, too much pain is inflicted for very little gain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
WaffleMovies.com
Full of great performances, and, sometimes, is amazingly compelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Examiner.com
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7.5/10
Movies.com
[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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 0.5/5
7M Pictures
an R-rated, steroid-fueled Looney Tunes cartoon
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Mania.com
You won't forget it easily; it just needs to find a better way to make its surprisingly pertinent points.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Film Racket
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Fresno Bee
At least when Moe hit Curly in the head with a hammer it wasn't the re-creation of a real crime.
Full Review
| Original Score: D-
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.
