Pain & Gain

 

With Pain & Gain, filmmaker Michael Bay seems to be trying to mix his overblown, fast-paced directing and editing style, with the warped sense of dark true crime humor of the Coen Brothers.  It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Bay has been given a smart and very funny script here that knows how to make it work.  The end result is not only the best film the director's ever done, but also the first truly successful comedy of 2013.

Yes, the movie is based on a real life kidnapping and murder case that happened between 1994 and 1995 in Miami, Florida.  And yes, in the wrong hands, making a dark comedy out of the events could come across as being extremely crass and tasteless.  I'm sure a number of people may even be offended by it.  But for me, the movie worked, because it never felt like Bay and his screenwriters were trying to make me laugh at the misery on display.  Instead, the movie plays up how unprepared the three kidnappers are for their situation.  And as the situation spirals out of their control, we laugh at their simple-minded attempts to cover it up.  The movie is wise to make sure we are laughing at these people, not with them.  The three main characters (and even some of their victims) are horrible people, and the movie makes no bones about letting us know this.  They don't deserve our sympathy, and the movie offers none.

The story of Pain & Gain is the pursuit of the American Dream, and three bodybuilders who got tired of waiting for it, and decided to try to steal it.  The leader is Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), a guy obsessed with self-help programs in an effort to better his own life.  He works as a personal trainer at a local gym, and one of his clients is a self-made millionaire named Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), who has basically lied, cheated, and stolen his way to living a luxurious and wealthy life.  Victor is not a nice guy.  He's verbally abusive to some of the people who work at the restaurant he owns, and seems to look down on anyone who is not like him.  The more time Daniel spends with Victor, the more he begins to realize that it's not fair that a "decent guy" like him has so little, while Victor seems to have everything.  He concocts a plan to steal all of Victor's wealth and assets, and enlists the aid of two fellow bodybuilders from the gym to help in the plan.

The cohorts he enlists include a pair of dim individuals who probably shouldn't be anywhere near a crime plan.  Then again, neither should Daniel.  His only experience in planning a kidnapping is that he's "watched a lot of movies" for inspiration of his plan.  Aiding him are Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-con and born-again Christian who has a weakness for snorting coke, and Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), whose continuous steroid use has left him with a bad case of Erectile Dysfunction.  Their early attempts to kidnap Victor are downright incompetent, and provide some big laughs as they try to disguise themselves as ninjas or other outlandish costumes to hide their identity.  When they're eventually successful in nabbing their intended victim, they lock Victor away in an abandoned warehouse, and torture him until he signs over his house, money, and everything he owns over to them.  When they get what they want from him, they attempt to murder him.  But even after crashing his car at full speed with him inside it, setting the car on fire, and even running him over with their own car two times, Victor Kershaw is still alive.

Yes, this actually happened.  The movie has a lot of fun with the fact it's based on real events.  At one point, when the film gets especially outrageous, it pauses just to remind us that yes, what we're watching is a true story.  What starts as a kidnapping and extortion plan soon turns to murder, and then spirals even further out of control when the guys decide to go for a second kidnapping job.  The movie itself is a dark satire of material and excess indulgence, and the twisted vision of the American Dream that these three men share of big homes, money, women, alcohol, and drugs.  Who better to parody excess and greed than Bay, who with his overblown blockbusters has often been accused of being overly excessive with his explosions, special effects, and sex appeal in his films.  With a more modest budget and an actual story to tell, Bay finds himself in unfamiliar territory, but he does a fine job.  I especially liked how he uses multiple narrators to portray different views of events as they unfold.

I should also point out that the cast is very brave for not only taking on these roles, but for throwing themselves as much into them.  As I mentioned, nobody comes across as being sympathetic or likable in this movie, which is the way it should be.  And yet, Wahlberg, Johnson, and Mackie all strike the perfect balance of egotism, anger, and being unknowingly dumb as a brick, which brings forth many of the film's laughs.  These are guys who think they're the smartest people in the room, but frequently screw up when the pressure's on.  In one of the film's funniest moments, the three guys are trying to find someone in a hospital, and end up getting lost, because they can't follow the color-coded system leading to different wings of the building.  The three leads wisely do not play their roles as antiheroes.  They are killers and thieves.  The fact that they are so incompetent allows us to laugh at them, not with them, as I mentioned earlier.  It's hard to play dumb without making it look forced, but Wahlberg and his two co-stars pull it off.  In fact, this is probably my favorite performance from Dwayne Johnson so far.

 

I just greatly enjoyed Pain & Gain from beginning to end.  It's not only the funniest film of the year so far, but it's also a great story, and a very well put together movie.  This is the kind of film Michael Bay was born to make.  You can tell that his heart was in this project 100%, and that he really believed in this movie.  I'd say the guy's turning a new leaf, but he has Transformers 4 coming down the pipeline, so I'll hold my tongue.  For now, I commend him and the cast for taking on this risky and rewarding dark comedy.  I'm actually looking forward to seeing this one again.

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