If there’s one adage that Michael Bay firmly believes in besides, “there’s no such thing as too many explosions and/or boobs,” and, “subtlety is for chumps who aren’t named Michael Bay,” it’s “write what you know”. And that’s an approach that’s worked out quite well for the infamous director. While he has amassed a legion of detractors, deriding his films as pure exploitative, plot-less garbage, you can’t say he hasn’t been successful with it. But what tends to be forgotten these days in the wake of Bay’s most recent works, the CGI-bloated Transformers series, is that Michael Bay is actually a pretty decent writer. Granted his humor borders on the tasteless side, but when he’s not burdening himself with aliens, military fan-boying, or big budget spectacles, he can actually write a tight, punchy script with more than a few laugh-out- loud moments. Pain & Gain harkens back to this Bay of old in the best way. No, his aversion to subtlety is still as bold and vibrant as ever. And you can count on his classic tropes of strippers and explosions to be on display with vengeance (it IS set in Miami after all). But this time around, beneath the decadence, there’s actually a follow-able story with honest-to-goodness characters, as opposed to one-note, unfunny caricatures.
Pain & Gain tells the remarkably true story of the remarkably inept Sun Gym Gang, a notorious trio of bodybuilders who were arrested on charges of extortion, kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. But they’re perhaps more famous for how absolutely horrible they turned out to be at all of these things, leaving a novice trail of clues a mile wide when they weren’t just being flat out incompetent. Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, the closest thing to “the brains of the operation” that the group has. Frustrated at being merely the owner of a gym, he decides to simply take his “fair share” when he becomes envious of his rude, wealthy client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). Lugo devises a plan with his insecure work-out partner Adrian (Anthony Mackie), and a former convict turned born-again Christian, Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to kidnap Kershaw and torture him into signing over all his wealth, business and property to them. But what sounds like the perfect plan quickly begins to fall apart in a classic case of the blind leading the blind, as Lugo turns out to be as inept at organized crime as he is competent at body-building.
The reason Pain & Gain works so much better than Bay’s recent outings is the strength of the script. While the film generated some controversy when the real-world victims of the Sun Gym Gang spoke out in fear that these criminals would be portrayed sympathetically, that’s far from the case here. Oddly enough, Bay’s usual lack of taste ends up making this portrayal exceedingly tasteful. Walberg and Mackie’s characters are written as vain, selfish idiots, while Johnson’s reformed convict (who easily steals the show with the film’s best lines) ends by being the most sympathetic. And as dark as the subject matter is, the laughs keep coming while never over-staying their welcome, creating a black comedy tone that Bay seems remarkably adept at. You probably shouldn’t hold your breath for Michael Bay to one day stop being Michael Bay, but Pain & Gain is a great reminder for why that’s necessarily a bad thing. Remove the clunky alien subplots and the shrill Shia Labeouf, and Bay can still hammer out the best kind of summer movie popcorn faire while not making you hate yourself.
