(dir. Michael Bay, 2013)
Are you a woman? A thin framed dude? A poor person? A generally meek, timid, or downright cowardly individual? Congratulations. Michael Bay thinks you're gross.
Apologies, but it's true. He doesn't want anything to do with you. He thinks you're a waste of time, money, and attention. At this point in his career, it's no secret what draws his fancy. The bigger the better. The louder the better. The hotter the better.
No doubt he'd be a repulsive person to spend an evening with, ordering bottle service and casually sauntering near nubile ladies, expecting on general principle for their panties to liquify, like their contents are made from the T-1000. But we're not asking to hang out with him. We're just asking him to make movies for us. And thankfully, after a decade bound in the PG-13 trenches, he finally lets his horrible person flag fly high with "Pain & Gain."
As a gym manager tired of living amongst the losers, Mark Wahlberg hatches a half baked plan to kidnap and extort a wealthy, dickish client of his (Tony Shalhoub), with the aid of two similarly idiotic, muscular gentlemen (Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie). Expectedly, things do not go entirely according to plan, with Shalhoub tortured and left for dead but still alive, calling on the aid of a private investigator (Ed Harris) to nail these guys while they lavish in his riches.
Jesus, lets say it: There ain't a trace of morality floundering in this movie. At no point does it slow down to ask, "Is this really OK?" At no point does it wink to the audience as if to indicate this is satire. At no point does Bay ever flatter us to feel we're better than these people either.
"Pain & Gain" is an exceedingly stupid movie about exceedingly stupid people that's also exceedingly entertaining, and while a more self-aware take would no doubt result in a different movie, I'm not sure it would result in a better one. This is a movie about sheer, unadulterated awfulness, the kind that leads mothers to hang their heads in shame, but Bay chooses to frame it as a celebration of that awfulness. Intellectualism holds no home here. Just aggressive roid rage gone amuck, made by and for people who aren't dissuaded by the end of "Scarface" from thinking that Tony Montana lived the dream.
Thing is, though, Bay is good at this. I mean really good at it - our reigning auteur of the bottom rung. I never require a movie to do anything specific. I only ask that it recognizes what it wants to be, then be that thing as good as it can be. "Pain & Gain" practically fetishizes stupidly, but it has the balls to pursue that route to the bitter end, never surrendering its amorality to a "Here's what we learned today" moment.
Robbed of his usual budget (he shot on a fairly miniscule 26 million), but still with a keen awareness of what makes him hard, Bay feels right at home. He bathes the movie in his typical lush, oversaturated colors, opting to shoot his brawny leading men from low angles whenever possible, until they tower over the camera like the buildings they resemble. Slow motion shots of scantily clad women abound. There's only two explosions, but Dwayne Johnson does do a line of coke off a stripper.
Spry, morbidly comic, and even charming in its juvenile nihilism, "Pain & Gain" most certainly isn't a movie for everyone. Quite possibly it isn't the movie for you. You probably know whether it is or not. When I called the movie "exceedingly stupid" before, I wasn't lying. But maybe I'm not taking the right angle. Bay lives in a world where stupidity is so pervasive it's indistinguishable from anything else. The movie isn't stupid in comparison to the smart. It's stupid like that's the only option. All we can do is either say no or gleefully plunge in.
If you choose the latter, you probably won't feel proud of yourself. But that doesn't mean you should feel guilty either.
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