Pain and Gain

With having heard today that Michael Bay will be producing the upcoming remake of The Birds, an announcement that spurred on a lot of personal feelings, I think it is only fitting to look at Pain and Gain, Bay’s voyage into a crime comedy.  Best known for his Transformer franchise, Bay often brings about movies that are visually spectacular yet generally lose focus when it comes down to items such as plot and character development.  Personally, those are two things that I would hold above immaculately rendered explosions, but I cannot blame people for getting excited about eye candy, especially when it is front and centre on the big screen.

In Pain and Gain we have a genre that is outside of the norm for Bay, a story about muscled up gym rats who turn to crimes such as kidnapping and fraud to earn some much desired cash.  The movie was based on the true story of the Sun Gym Gang, and stars Mark Walhberg, Dwayne Johnson, and Anthony Mackie as the rogues gallery of villains who have more brawns than brain and end up facing mishap after mishap as they attempt to kidnap and extort a wealthy jerk, played by Tony Shaloub.  One thing this movie teaches us is that iron-pumping alpha males may not make criminal masterminds.

Even though this is not the typical Michael Bay format, it does not take long to see his personal style imprinted all throughout this tale.  I often think of his style as ‘rock and roll directing,’ where things are loud, flashy, and non-stop, and unfortunately this seeped into the bones of Pain and Gain, giving it a feeling of an energy drink commercial at times. 

One aspect that keeps this driving feel throughout the film is the almost continuous assault of music, feeling like the beating heart of a speed freak who has just ran a marathon, drank a case of Jolt Colas (remember those?), and ate chocolate covered espresso beans.  It reminded me of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where music seems to feel the need to creep into almost every moment to the point of not allowing situations, emotions, and environment settle down on the audience.  I believe the point of this choice was to create a feel to the movie to mimic the roid-raging fellas who like to keep the iron pumping, but it never felt like a match.  In the movie Crank, a film with a speedy pulse as well, I was annoyed by the style but soon appreciated how it went hand in hand with how the film rolled out.  In Pain and Gain there appears to be no real correlation between the flowing of the story (not that I am saying there is much of a flow) and the presentation.  There was also an abundance of slow motions shots for some reason.

For a movie that is a ‘comedy,’ I barely found any moments of laughter as a lot of the jokes seemed almost cruel in nature or extremely immature.  Rebel Wilson was able to bring some humour, charm, and charisma into the film through her performance as Mackie’s girlfriend, but her appearances were few and far between.  Dwayne Johnson also made me laugh a time or two, but not as much as I would have liked to.  His character (which was not based on a real life person, but more of a collection of multiple people) was incredibly simplistic and almost stereotypish in how he behaved, making his motivations almost unbelievable.  There is no point in blaming him, or any of the cast for that matter, as he was working with what he was given.

In the film, the three main characters are portrayed as mostly harmless individuals who just get caught up in a situation that brings about actions that they were not really intending to indulge in, such as torture and murder.  The reality of the case is that the torture was in truth brutal, almost done in good fun, and murder was an intention from the start.  As the film progressed, I was not sure why Bay chose to attempt to make the characters relatable, because they really weren’t, not even in the dumbed down and padded version that we ended up seeing.  Were we supposed to sympathize with these people?  Was the intention that we would see the movie and think about the poor guys who just lost their way?

A bright note in the movie was the underused character of Ed Harris, who played a private investigator (retired, but called in for one more case… yep, cliché) who assisted the kidnap victim in tracking down the people who took everything he had.  Really, Harris should have been the person the story should have followed, as he was someone the audience could relate to and understand.  Instead, he was just another piece in a puzzle and felt like a bunch of mismatched pieces jammed together by a toddler with peanut butter all over his hands.

Normally I do not get too critical of a film that claims it is based on a true story and then deviates away from the truth to get to the story that the director was inspired to tell.  Pain and Gain gets no shelter from this as far as I am concerned, as this was the first movie that I can recall that actually stopped the action well into the film to directly remind the audience that ‘this is still a true story.’  Claims as such made outside the credits, or close to them, just serve as an indicator that something like this has actually happened, but to insert a statement directly in the middle of the tale seeks to assure the audience that it is an accurate story.  Oddly enough, at the moment of the reassurance of the legitimacy of the story, we see a fictional character grilling body parts in a location where it did not happen, and getting reprimanded for it by the character who, in real life, was the one who did the grilling.

The movie really felt like a jumbled mess, aided by the fact that almost every character got a chance to be the narrator, creating a confusion of who this film is really about.  For a crime movie it was not very captivating, and for a comedy it was not very funny.  It was a film that tried to use a flashy approach that works well enough for a popcorn munching blockbuster, but falls extremely short for a ‘based on real life’ movie about some tank top wearing good old boys who commit fraud, kidnapping, and murder.

Rating – 1.5 out of 4 stars