Review: Pain & Gain

Copyright: Paramount Pictures

Seem to me that Michael Bay has always been an easy target for ridicule. The man is marginalized (not in a commercial sense) because his work lacked a compelling authorial vision. Over the years, his film became know for their hollowness and complete focus on profit-making, clear in the Transformers series. His current legacy stands at box office figures and successes.

His he last film, however paints a different picture while it remains very much Bay-like. It’s the Miami in the mid-nineties. The U.S. economy is booming, and the American dream is just a few easy steps away. Fitness instructor and unsuccessful con man Danny believes in that dream, and wants to work on it in the same way he works on his muscles - full of enthusiasm, but without too much thought.

Slowly, Danny forms a plan and gathers a team o similarly minded people. Their aim is to kidnap a wealthy local entrepreneur and then force him to grant them access to his assets and funds. Even when things start to fall apart in every imaginable way, Danny remains true to himself and the idea that everything is obtainable if you only work hard at it.

The visual identity of Pain & Gain will be familiar to anyone who watched Bad Boys. Miami looks and feels the same - good-looking people who relentlessly work out, a beautiful city on the ocean where every day is sunny and excitement is found around every corner. At the same time, Bay manages remain sarcastic about his earlier Miami-based films, while he depicts dumb but determined people willing to do terrible things.

Danny is played by Mark Wahlberg. Since Boogie Nights it was clear that Wahlberg had a big capacity for playing characters that are both driven and incredibly narrow-minded. He is supported by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who plays an ex-criminal and a born-again Christian, and Adrian (Anthony Mackie), the only crew member that has any external insight and reservation about their moronic plan.

Their target is a business person Viktor, played perfectly by the great Tony Shalhoub - his cynicism, intelligence and despair are all later followed by a righteous crusade to expose the crew. His perspective works as a good counterweight to Danny’s greed and stupidity. Internal monologues of all major and minor characters are present through the course of the film and they casts further light on the level of absurdity and unintentional humor in this incredible true story .

If I look at the plot in a much broader frame, it shows a place and a time that isn’t exactly ancient history (the events took place in 1995) and where everybody believed you could get rich without much pain. This idea can be seen as a sort of metaphysical parent that gave birth to the predator mentality that soon after led to the global economic crisis - we wanted everything and if someone suffered because of it, that's their problem. The character in Pain & Gain, just like the greedy bankers and investors in 2008, failed to realize that the inflicted pain always travel in both directions.