Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) is sculptured to perfection. He works at the gym where he feels he can help give anybody the body they want, and has helped his boss John Mese (Rob Corddry) turn the place around with a few smart business decisions. But his efforts have not given him the lifestyle he wants - a grand mansion, a top-of-the-range sports car, babes hanging off his massive arms, and every other materialistic pleasure life has to offer. He begins to lust after the kind of life lived by Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), and so hatches a plan to extort the man for every penny he has after being inspired by motivational speaker Jonny Wu (Ken Jeong).Along with the steroid-addled and impotency-stricken Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), Daniel recruits enormous ex-convict and cocaine addict Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to assist him in kidnapping and torturing Kershaw until he signs over all of his assets to them. The plan works, but they fail to kill Kershaw after attempting to run him over numerous times. However, nobody believes his story of three imbeciles pulling off such a crime, choosing instead to believe it to be the result of dodgy dealings with criminal organisations. So Daniel, Paul and Adrian are allowed to live the lifestyle they have fantasised about, until they decide it isn't enough and plan to shake down smut peddler Frank Griga (Michael Rispoli), while Kershaw hires private investigator Ed DuBois (Ed Harris) to help him take back his property.
It's quite a change of genre for director Michael Bay, who has spent the last few years making billions at the box-office with huge explosions and CGI robots. While Pain & Gain does demonstrate a previously unseen knack for black comedy, Bay does not possess the necessary skills to tell a story of murder and greed with the required intelligence or satire. When we should be laughing at these preening narcissists, Bay films them with his usual sickly sheen as if to admire them, obscuring the point the film is, I think, trying to make. The decision to play the film mainly for laughs is also in somewhat bad taste. While watching a coked-up Johnson remove a victim's fingerprints by grilling their dismembered hands on a barbecue is the stuff of black comedy gold, you have to remember that there were real victims in this story, and it all happened quite recently.
The main positive is that the performances are all spot-on. Wahlberg is perfect as a man who values his self-worth by his possessions, and Johnson restrains himself enough in a role that could have spilled over into complete farce. A lot of the film is in fact farcical, and not in a good way. Bay insists of filling the screen with fancy wide-angled shots and outdated screen text, when a little dose of subtlety would have worked better. Yet despite its flaws and a bloated sub-plot involving Doorbal's relationship with the doctor who is injecting his penis with the necessary drugs to make it work properly (Rebel Wilson), Pain & Gain is pretty entertaining, and amusing enough to hope that Bay may think about taking a different direction to his usual blockbuster drivel (although he did make the appalling Transformers: Age of Extinction after this).
Directed by: Michael Bay
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Dwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub, Ed Harris, Rob Corddry, Bar Paly, Rebel Wilson
Country: USA
Rating: ***
Tom Gillespie
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