Jeremy’s Tophunder №73: Pain & Gain

7 min readJun 16, 2020

Most of the time, when Michael Bay directs a movie, it’s a visually incoherent epic action movie with an absurd fictional premise. This in turn allows the characters in the story to act as such — there is seldom a character in a Michael Bay movie that even remotely resembles a real person.

So what happens when Michael Bay directs a movie about real people, based on a true story?

Well, you get a visually incoherent small-scale action movie with an absurd premise, in which almost no characters even remotely resemble a real person.

Really, I’m not sure if this is just a match made in heaven between a director and a story, or if Michael Bay is just physically incapable of constructing a story that doesn’t feel like it was extracted directly from the mind of a 14-year old boy. Honestly, it’s probably both.

If you haven’t seen Pain & Gain, congratulations. It’s a dumb movie. Basically, Mark Wahlberg plays a fitness freak and personal trainer that decides that in order to get ahead in life, he should rob his wealthy client (who he assumes is probably dirty but has no real idea). To help him out, he recruits fellow fitness freaks Anthony Mackie (who needs the money to fix his erectile dysfunction brought on by steroid abuse) and The Rock (a cocaine-addicted ex-convict). They kidnap Tony Shaloub, steal his money and his house, try to kill him, but fail, only to luck out when the police don’t believe Shaloub’s ridiculous but true story. So Tony Shaloub does what any of us would do — he calls private detective Ed Harris. When the trio of inept criminals run out of money, they try to swindle a phone sex entrepreneur into investing in a fake venture (finally tapping the untapped phone sex markets of India and China), only to accidentally kill him and his wife when the deal doesn’t work out (don’t really worry about the details, they’re convoluted and dumb). Ed Harris pieces together the case, and with the help of Miami police, they arrest Anthony Mackie and The Rock, but Mark Wahlberg escapes to the Bahamas, where eventually he is arrested, too. That’s it. That’s basically the whole movie.

How much of it is true? Well, a surprising amount. By that I mean, more than none of it is true. Obviously, they took some dramatic license, combining characters and changing names and details, but a decent portion of the paragraph above is either factual, or more true than not.

And somehow (perhaps appropriately), it feels exactly like a scaled-down version of any other Micahel Bay movie. Instead of a giant asteroid hurtling towards Earth or giant robot cars battling for supremacy of the universe, we have three incompetent criminals who inexplicably fail up the ladder for two hours before their world comes crashing down around them. It’s truly a Seussical premise that only becomes more and more ridiculous the more the story unfolds.

So why do I like this movie? Well, for one, as much as I rip on how visually incoherent Bay is as a director, I still absolutely love his visual style. Much in the same way that I enjoy eating Hot Pockets and listening to terrible early 2000’s rap music, I fully recognize that Bay’s visual style is absolute trash, and yet, I can’t help but find it entertaining. He’s so repetitive and predictable with certain types of shots. Some directors become revered for a particular style, like the Spielberg one-shot, or Scorsese with his tracking shots. Bay, meanwhile, is more ridiculed than revered for his “signature” shots, like, for example, the spinning 360 hero shot:

When a director like Spielberg or Scorsese or Tarantino or Fincher or Nolan (directors I like and respect and admire) copy themselves, I think to myself “this is interesting and new,” but when Bay copies himself, I think, “this is dumb and repetitive.” But for some reason, I seem to enjoy them both, albeit for different reasons. I’m not quite sure why, and maybe I’m not meant to.

Most of the time, when Michael Bay makes a terrible movie, I love it in spite of its overt terribleness, and often wouldn’t change a thing about it. Take, for example, The Rock. I genuinely can’t imagine any way that I would want that movie to be different. It’s perfect. It’s terrible, but in a perfect way. I love it for all of the things it does well, but especially for all of the things it does poorly. The Bay-isms aren’t a point of criticism, they’re what I like about the movie.

But I’m not sure that’s the case with Pain & Gain. Sure, part of the reason I like it is because it clearly has Bay’s fingerprints all over it, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of movie it would have been in the hands of a different director. With other Bay movies, I never think that. I never want to see another director’s attempt at Armageddon, or Transformers. But Pain & Gain is different.

Look at what Adam McKay did with The Big Short and Vice, and think about what he could have done here. Look at what Edgar Wright did with Baby Driver, or what Todd Phillips did with Joker. To me, this wasn’t a comedy that needed an action director to make it exciting, it was an action movie that needed a comedy director to make it more snappy. Think about Pain & Gain compared to say, Superbad. It’s a group of in-over-their-head friends, trying to advance themselves by pulling off a job that they aren’t remotely prepared for, because they’re idiots. In broad strokes, the stories are pretty similar. If Pain & Gain had been directed by someone whose focus was on story rather than spectacle, this could have actually been a legitimately great movie. There’s certainly enough here — it’s an insane (but true) story, and the cast actually all put together some good performances.

Dwayne Johnson isn’t someone that you’d really consider a “good” actor. He’s just a huge dude who stars in action movies. But playing a relatively meek, born-again Christian ex-convict who occasionally snaps into violent rages and slowly goes crazy because of all the cocaine, I think he actually submits the best acting performance of his career. Or at least it’s the one where he attempts to show any semblance of range. And I think he kind of pulls it off. He’s largely responsible for my favorite scene in the movie, when the gang is trying to dispose of the two bodies of the people they accidentally killed, and Johnson, high out of his gourd and rather quickly descending into mania, decides that the best way to remove the fingerprints from the bodies is to burn them on a charcoal grille. But it’s too smoky inside the warehouse, so he brings the grill outside and waves to the neighbors as the screen freezes for a second and text reminds us that, yes, this is still a true story.

Mark Wahlberg is exactly what you expect — a cocky dude with decent comedy timing, and a certain voice inflection during funny scenes that make you wonder whether he’s actually trying to be funny. I think he’s perfect for the role, kind of like he was in The Other Guys.

So, is Pain & Gain a good movie? Not really. It could have been great. It got some good performances and it has a compelling story. But it’s one of the rare instances that I wish Michael Bay had picked a different project. That said, it still makes the list, because of those signature Michael Bay touches. I was probably going to like this movie a lot regardless of how it turned out, and all things considered, it could have been a lot worse. But it could have been a lot better, too. But that’s just life sometimes, I guess.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

5. The Shawshank Redemption

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

10. Inglourious Basterds

11. The Big Short