As a certain hardly recognizable, high-octane account of Pearl Harbour testifies, “based on actual events” is not a common or comfortable modus operandi for director Michael Bay, whose latest chaotic romp across the silver screen opened Friday.
But Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackie as a trio of bodybuilders turned kidnappers in 1990s Miami, puts paid to any notion that fact is less outrageous than fiction with two hours of perversely facetious, pitch-black comedy.
Pain & Gain  
Directed by Michael Bay. |
Spurred on by their own weightlifting maxims, that pain means gain and effort expended is reward earned, Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) and Adrian Doorbal (Mackie) recruit born-again ex-con Paul Doyle (Johnson) to help them kidnap a wealthy client of Lugo’s at the Sun Gym, the crusty Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), and confine him until he signs over all his money.
Their sense of entitlement, derived as it is from a simple-minded idea of the American Dream, means that when Victor fails to comply, it is time for torture; as weeks pass, not even the possibility that Victor has identified them is enough to cause his kidnappers to reconsider – instead they gamely resolve to kill him once his money is in hand.
For once it is the supporting actors, not the protagonist, who get to play the memorable characters; Dwayne Johnson and Anthony Mackey in particular acquit themselves well as Mark Wahlberg founders through a role that – intentionally but maybe not wholly – brings new meaning to the term vacuous. Rebel Wilson and Peter Stormare (more briefly) stand out in walk-on parts, while Rob Corddry and Ken Jeong find themselves trapped between their comedy personae and roles that are not especially funny.
The irredeemably sloppy script, which frames most of the story in a pointless flashback, gives each major character his own voiceover – not just the three criminals, but Kershaw, Detective Ed Du Bois (Ed Harris), and others besides – and makes clear that this is “unfortunately” a true story over the course of a leaden first act rife with the customary misogyny, racism and homophobia for which Michael Bay’s cinematic universe is a breeding ground, if it is not their very apotheosis.
Modest embellishment, from comical freeze-frame intertitles to an invented armored truck heist (and minor appendage loss), doesn’t hurt the entertainment factor once the narrative gets up to speed, and neither do the extensive cast and lavish locations to which the director has access – the film’s $26 million budget is disposably cheap by Bay’s standards.
But there are frequent, discomfiting collisions between film humour and the factual record: when the bungling bandits kill a man, that is the story of an actual human life snuffed out by criminals, not just the cartoonish antics of an R-rated Home Alone. The survivors of this story, and the relatives of those who did not survive, are real (though names were changed).
That Bay is able to extract so many laughs over the course of the film serves as a testament to his skill handling the material – if ever there were a director hard-wired to the collective teen male adrenaline gland, surely it is Bay – but equally to his tastelessness.
Of course, when the heroes are the bad guys running a vehicle over a man’s head to finish the job an intentional car accident and subsequent explosion didn’t quite make good on, and everything is as bleakly comical as it is gratuitous, there is the idea of satire to excuse it all, but since the film ends with the same glibly hollow catchphrases that began it, that might be giving Bay too much credit.
“Some people are clueless,” the director seems to be asserting with a straight face, and as true as that may be, coming from the director of Bad Boys, Transformers, and Armageddon, it is an unexpected message indeed.