After making Paramount nearly $3 billion with his Transformers trilogy, Michael Bay was ready to cash in his goodwill chips and make one for him. He had been ready to roll on Pain & Gain in 2009, but then Paramount insisted on one more Transformers. After Dark of the Moon, Bay signed a two-picture deal: They would bankroll Pain & Gain to the tune of $26 million, but in return he had to give them one more Transformers. Fair trade, I guess. Pain & Gain is Michael Bay’s perverted funhouse mirror of the American Dream. It’s also one that I’ve covered before on a completely different failed blog, where I break down the movie and the ways it uses and misuses the American flag to maximum effect. Check it out.
Bay had been interested in telling this story as early as 2000, after reading Pete Collins’ 1999 series of articles in the Miami Sun Times. Pain & Gain, as one of our narrators points out up front, is an unfortunately true story. It’s the quintessentially American story of three wannabe entrepreneurs trying to cheat their way into an upper-middle-class lifestyle by scamming rich morons and committing a few major felonies in the process. Who among us can’t relate to that? On its face, though, this is a truly heinous series of events. Mark Wahlberg’s real-life counterpart is still on death row for the crimes he committed in this story. So naturally, Michael Bay looked at it all and saw the makings of a comedy.
The Bad Boys films have their charms, but most of the humor comes from stars who cut their teeth on TV sitcoms. Pain & Gain, on the other hand, stars Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson, three guys who can be funny, but made names for themselves playing no-nonsense tough guys. So Michael Bay’s first true ‘comedy’ is a true story of murder and extortion, starring three action stars, where the humor comes from the sheer exaggeration of the lifestyle found therein. And just like with Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the very idea of co-opting actual events for the purposes of a silly comedy makes the whole farce seem in incredibly poor taste.
Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, who we first meet getting hired on as the new manager of the Sun Gym in Miami, Florida.1 He promises owner John Mese (Actual Comedian Rob Corddry) that he’ll triple the gym’s membership or he’ll quit. He manages this in just three weeks with tactics like giving out free memberships to strippers to entice others to join. As we meet him in the film, Lugo already has a conviction under his belt, having done time for fraud. Mese’s not bothered by this, all he sees is a fast talker and a mountain of muscles. Even as the gym manager, Lugo gets fed up with his life, and quickly ropes fellow bodybuilders Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) into a scheme to kidnap and extort sleazeball gym member Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) for every last penny he has.
The comedy is that these guys prove to be woefully inept at almost every turn. Rank amateurs, as it turns out. They fail in their mission to kidnap Kershaw twice2 before finally nabbing him with a taser to the face. Kershaw ID’s Lugo almost immediately because he recognizes his awful vanilla scented cologne, so naturally Lugo has no other option than to take everything Kershaw owns and then kill him. This also doesn’t go as planned, as they try to stage a suicide in his car, which turns into setting him on fire, which then turns into Doyle trying and failing to run him over with their van. It’s exaggerated to the point of parody, but then knowing that a lot of this actually happened really takes some of the wind out of those sails.
As mentioned above, our opening narrator says “Unfortunately, this is a true story.” That’s private detective Ed Du Bois, III (The Rock‘s Ed Harris), who is initially skeptical of Kershaw, who has evaded three murder attempts and landed himself in the hospital. After the Miami PD refuse to take him seriously3, he hires Du Bois. Du Bois eventually does crack the case, but not before our boys get desperate and try out their little extortion scam on unwitting gym patron Frank Griga (Michael Rispoli). This time the boys actually succeed in killing their prey, but in a comedy of errors so ridiculous that Bay feels the need to editorialize it with title cards.
One of the more clever tricks the film employs is having multiple characters narrate their own parts of the story. Du Bois is our cosmic narrator, telling us how things finally shook out. But then we get Lugo explaining things from his perspective, and his belief that “If you’re willing to do the work, you can have anything.” He is, of course, referring to the fact that he’s about commit several felonies in order to get ahead in life, but the way he sees it, you’re only guilty if you get caught. He applies the lessons learned from bullshit self help guru Johnny Wu (Dark of the Moon‘s Ken Jeong) to convince himself that everything he’s doing is 100% justifiable. This all ties in with his idea that being motivated and taking what you want is the American Dream. He’s not wrong, in the sense that that’s how the country was built, and that’s how capitalism has operated for hundreds of years. But it doesn’t make it any more right.
Bay revels in the joys of avarice, almost to the point of overload. The movie is two hours and ten minutes and feels about thirty minutes too long. So much of it is just our guys celebrating their successes and living their dreams. Lugo moves himself right into Kershaw’s house and takes over the guy’s sandwich shop. Doorbal spends his cut fixing his steroid-induced erectile dysfunction (with an assist from Armageddon/Bad Boys II‘s Peter Stormare) and marrying his nurse (Rebel Wilson). Doyle, a born-again Christian, indulges in sex and drugs anyway because why the hell not, right? And if anyone can claim to walk away with this movie, it’s Dwayne Johnson. He weaponizes his family friendly persona to turn Paul Doyle into a lovable teddy bear who just happens to be a colossal fuckup and womanizer. Bay capitalizes on this by making him the butt of most of the movie’s jokes.
On the one hand, I understand the logic in making this a comedy. It’s too unbelievable a story, and the only way to do it justice is to go so far over the top that you can’t help but laugh. But it’s also got everything that Bay loves all in one package: Macho dudes, bikini-clad supermodels, expensive sports cars, all glistening with sweat in the hot Miami sun. Throw in some SWAT guys in full tactical gear and a couple speedboats, and we’re basically in Bad Boys II territory. Telling this story straight would be difficult, because so many of the true details are so bizarre. But to make it an out-and-out comedy, where we’re laughing at Lugo & Co.’s constant screwups, feels… morally wrong too?
I don’t know. My recollection of this one was that it was a refreshing change of pace from Bay’s Transformers slop, a chance to flex his Tony Scott muscles. (If you really wanted to be charitable, you could call this Bay’s tribute to Scott, as this came out less than a year after Scott’s death.) Back in 2013, I thought this was great. Eleven years later, and it just feels exploitative and tasteless. Maybe time has mellowed me out too much. Maybe in the age of true crime podcasts, a story like this just hits different. Asking us to laugh at three idiots committing double homicide isn’t my idea of a good time anymore. I respect the craft put into it, I just kinda wish this had actually been a work of fiction, ya know?
NEXT TIME: Dinobots.
Leave a comment