Film Review: PAIN & GAIN

PAIN & GAIN-Beau Behan (BeauBehan.com)

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie

Directed by Michael Bay

Rated R, 130 minutes, Action, Comedy

Michael Bay’s latest cinematic effort, Pain & Gain will be languishing in the throes of cockamamie direction for a long time. This film, undoubtedly, is catering for the boys of summer – get that bod ripped for brawns, and forget that brilliance for brains. It has that theme of the song that Cyndi Lauper popularized in the 80s — ‘…just wanna have fun” — only this time, it is the ‘boys just having fun’ with a steroidal facet akin with disaster, and nothing resplendent of Bay’s previous box office successes, including Armageddon and Transformers series.


The film is based on Pete Collins’ report for the Miami New Times on the 1994-1995 Sun Gym case. Three musclemen from Miami Beach, played by Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie, concoct a scheme to kidnap a rich guy and take over his possessions by forcing him to sign them over.

Pain & Gain was made with a $25 M (million) budget, relatively small compared to the astronomical cost of making the Transformers. Bay agreed to do the fourth installment of this mega-blockbuster hit series only if his studio backers would let him shoot Pain & Gain first. Some might conjure up the idea that Bay’s cinematic artistry was compromised due to this low budget, but I certainly would not agree. I would rather err on the side of drumming up that quick GAIN at the box office and chant—‘profits, profits, profits’—because when boys ‘wanna have fun’, boys, most of the time, literally just ‘wanna have fun’. That plethora of superlatives, forget about it. Instead, let’s have quips with muscle mania and aim for that vascular gut with Jane Fonda’s mantra of ‘No Pain, No Gain’. The film’s angle shots are distorted; its sound is deafening at times. However, be that as it may, the boys would still laugh it out loud and be entertained as these ‘three stooges’ try to show us some renegade tactics lackluster of that visceral imagery.

The film’s screenplay was written by the duo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Whether Pain & Gain is a product of this collaboration or just simply a Michael Bay film is a crux of the question. I can only make an inference based on a Markus-Stephen screenplay, including the Narnia movies. I would say, Bay and the duo met half-way to project this documentary story in the silver screen but nothing compared to a famous Mark Wahlberg movie, Boogie Nights – where size and volume really do matter and resonate both in acting and directing.

Overall, Pain & Gain exacerbates the PAIN more than the GAIN to ENTERTAIN, albeit still amusing.