Movie Review – Pain & Gain

Pain & Gain (2013)
Written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Directed by Michael Bay

We started with Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy but have taken a sharp left turn in our “This Is America” series with this film. I am not a fan of Michael Bay’s movies. I can’t name one I have ever enjoyed. His maximalist style of filmmaking is the kind that bores me really fast: a hyperactive editor who makes constant cuts so that the entire picture resembles one extended lumbering trailer. However, if we are looking for films that capture an aspect of what America is, Mr. Bay clearly has his finger on the country’s pulse. His early Transformers movies were glorified ads for the U.S. military. There are lots of American flags waving in the wind. However, this veneer of post-9/11 jingoistic patriotism hides a deep contempt Bay has for his audience. This film, in particular, is dripping with scorn.

Based on a horrific true story, the film is set in 1994 and follows bodybuilder/trainer Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) as he works at a gym in Miami. One of his clients is Victor Kershaw (Tony Shaloub), who implies he has made money through criminal activities and lives a lavish lifestyle. Misinterpreting a motivational speaker’s advice leads Daniel to plot a kidnapping of Kershaw and take over his wealth. Daniel is assisted in this by his co-worker Adrian (Anthony Mackie) as well as Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), a born-again ex-con trying to stay off drugs. They manage to hold Kershaw in an old warehouse while getting his assets signed over to them and then unsuccessfully try to murder Kershaw. As things do with these sorts of stories, our trio finds themselves in over their heads, and it’s only a matter of time until the cops catch up with them.

One of the points of contention with this movie came from the family members of two people the Sun Gym Gang murdered. The film plays this scene with dark comedy, trying to make light of the dismemberment and dispersal of body parts. The family members felt this content made the murderers far too sympathetic, and it does. The way the scenes are shot, and the tone conveyed is a mix of comedy & tension, implying the audience is meant to be rooting for these men to successfully dispose of the bodies so they don’t get caught. I can’t imagine how sick family members felt watching these scenes. Like many others, this sequence is Bay’s weird & tone-deaf attempts at comedy. 

A common trope of the director is “fat people are funny simply because they are fat,” which is demonstrated this time by Rebel Wilson as Mackie’s love interest. Her first scene focuses on gross racist stereotypes, the implication being “Black men love fat white women.” An appreciation of women of all sizes is fine, but the tone here intends that we laugh at this scene for this reason entirely. Despite popping up throughout the film, The nurse character never gets much more development beyond this. She’s just that character’s “fat girlfriend” and nothing more.

That sort of joke is aimed at a very lowbrow audience, but I felt Bay was showing tremendous disgust toward his audience. Daniel is a perfect audience surrogate for the type of person who loves Bay’s work, hyper-masculine & wholly entangled in the grindset capitalism that ruins lives in the States. Daniel has an unhinged interpretation of get-rich-quick advice given by a motivational speaker, summed up simply by “seize the day” or, more contemporaneously, “YOLO.” He reads this as a call to violently take Kershaw’s fortune and life from him. 

My reading of the film is that I could feel Bay’s disgust with these people emanating off the screen. But it was presented just as stupidly as the characters because Bay cannot articulate anything of meaning in his work beyond the most basic assumptions about human beings. Everyone in Bay’s world is either a fuckable sex object or just a mound of festering repulsion. There is no kindness in this place, just scorn for people not being “as cool” as him, I suppose?

Our supposed protagonists (I don’t want to meet the people rooting for these three; they would be scary) do increasingly vile & horrible things, culminating in the butchering of two people they accidentally (?) murdered. The film’s cutting causes it to feel like an over two-hour montage sequence, which adds to the queasy feeling of watching it all unfold. Bay is a filmmaker whose two key attributes are his dumbness and cruelty, both traits on display in these criminals, whom I got the sense he imagines he’s better than. The hyperactive tone of the film is likely reflective of how Daniel perceives the world. However, this is how all Bay films have looked for the last two decades minimum, which is even more troublesome if the previous read of the aesthetic is accurate. 

Bay’s America has always been a horrific place to me. The ideologies of people with money & power operate from the most basic assumptions about human beings. Yet, when I reflect back on my 40 years living in the States, he’s not that far off. The quiet, seething rancor of the small Southern town I grew up in operates on a different frequency, but these traits are there. Bay’s setting, Miami, allows for the rottenness inside people to receive a grotesque sun-bleached amplification. 

All that said, this was the first Michael Bay film that held my attention from start to end, and I wouldn’t tell people not to watch it. Pain & Gain serves as a telling peek into the mind of the director but also a lot of our fellow Americans. Dwayne Johnson’s role in this film is the most shocking aspect, in my opinion. He’s a celebrity who could not be more obsessed with his brand and framing as heroic in the media. Who he plays is the antithesis of that, physically imposing but also weak-minded & evil. I don’t think many films can capture the tone of what America looks like from the outside better than Pain & Gain. It’s a nauseating carnival ride of horrors fueled by greed & hate.