Like Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike, Pain & Gain offers a sketchy side of Florida that seems pretty cool from a distance, but gets uglier the closer one gets. Bay kicks things off with the worn out tactic of beginning at the end of the story, showing us exactly how batcrap insane things are going to get, before sliding back to a time before all Hell broke loose. Mark Wahlberg is Daniel Lugo, a dopey con-man and bodybuilder who adores his pecs over all things. He sees his ripped abs as a physical expression of his own hard work and a realization of the American Dream....as filtered through the lens of a guy who idolizes Tony Montana. And like Montana, Daniel wants everything life has to offer. He wants to be rich, famous, and powerful, and if the world isn't going to give it to him, he'll just have to take it.
Daniel's buddy, Adrian Dorbal (Anthony Mackie) also has dreams of something more. The two work together in a swanky gym for muscle-heads, built up from nothing thanks to Daniel's go-getter attitude. A steroid-freak with inferiority issues and an embarrassing case of erectile dysfunction, Adrian is a follower who looks to Daniel as a guiding light. Daniel is essentially Boogie Nights' Dirk Diggler after a few bench presses, and Adrian is his Reed Rothchild.
As a personal trainer to Miami's rich and famous, Daniel sees everything he can't have right in front of his face, and spurred on by the bombastic self-help guru Johnny Wu (Ken Jeong), he decides to do something about it. Gathering Adrian and a massive ex-con turned Jesus freak named Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), Daniel decides to kidnap and extort Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), a wealthy entrepreneur.
The ugly superficiality of Bay's vision is best exemplified by Victor, an ugly, boasting, demeaning blowhard. A Half-Colombian/Half-Jew (we're constantly reminded of this fact), Victor represents the American Dream at its worst. He's a self-made man who got there on the backs of others, and now that he's at the top makes sure everyone else feels like crap about their own station in life. He's all ego, nastiness, and machismo, who never misses an opportunity to rub his wealth in the face of others. He makes for a wildly unsympathetic victim, captured in clownish fashion by three morons who are just as twisted as he is on the inside. They may be buffoons in every sense of the word, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous.
The actual kidnapping is a thing of absurd beauty as they botch the job in increasingly stupid ways before finally stumbling into success. Of course they didn't bother to plan anything ahead of time so it all spirals south as they struggle briefly to hide their identities while keeping Victor holed up in a sex-toy shop, and Bay makes sure to deliver as many dildo sight gags as one can reasonably expect from him. Flush with all of Victor's cash, the guys indulge in all of the dangerous excesses that made him their target to begin with. Daniel flaunts his sweet new ride with the Scooby-Doo seats, Adrian indulges in his love for overweight women by marrying his sarcastic penis doctor (a great Rebel Wilson), and Paul snorts it all up his nose, basically.
Riotously funny and simply too incredible to be believed, Bay and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (they wrote Captain America: The First Avenger) are constantly forced to remind us that this is indeed based on a true story. Bay employs a number of energetic flourishes to keep the pace moving and to show off the comic lunacy of the unfolding events, and for a while we're given the impression that this will be just some boys-will-be-boys misguided romp. But this story gets extremely dark, and the stylistic excesses that worked to make us laugh have an opposing effect as things start to get pretty violent. Bay does a brilliant job of walking in both worlds, and it's a sign of just how talented a filmmaker he can be when his mind is put to it. Sure, he still presents every theme in broad strokes, and the one thing he doesn't do to excess is subtlety, but his films always evoke an emotional response.
While Pain & Gain marks a return of sorts for Bay, the same goes for Wahlberg who hasn't played a character quite this screwed up since the aforementioned Boogie Nights. His Daniel Lugo is every bit the ambitious, oblivious dufus with mixed-up priorities as Dirk Diggler was, but just the same he's also a guy you wish had his head screwed on straight. Daniel's a likable guy, even when at his worst. It's the kind of role Wahlberg excels at and he does a terrific job here. Some may be surprised by how funny Mackie is, given that he's mostly given male impotence jokes to work with. It's Johnson who really stands out, though, and watching him go from criminal to man of God (complete with his own mini-sex scandal) to a drug-addled rager is perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the film. Johnson, who appears to have put on about 30lbs of muscle for the role, plays off his own inestimable charm in shaping the character, so that he resembles something of a really angry and confused teddy bear with 24-inch biceps.
The film does begin to overstay its welcome, though, and the 130 minute runtime can't support what eventually becomes a one-note story with the sole gag being that these guys are idiots. Once that begins to lose its effectiveness, Bay just assumes that making everything even more outlandish will solve the problem. It doesn't, and eventually the unique personalities that made the film so much fun are just smothered. Ed Harris shows up and channels his Appaloosa persona for awhile as a private investigator hired to find the guys and bring them in, and there are some decent laughs from doe-eyed supermodel Bar Paly as a slutty stripper who becomes a key part of the guys' scheme. She also gets passed around from guy-to-guy like a joint. Hey, this is a Bay film, were you expecting the woman to be treated with respect?
Bay knowingly digs into his familiar bag of tricks, from low-angle 360 shots to guys walking away from explosions...in slow motion, of course. This is Bay relishing in the exuberance of being Bay, but there are more layers and greater depth to the story than in any film of his career. Like a steroid and coke-fueled gym rat, Pain and Gain does eventually crash, so enjoy the powerfully fun high while it lasts.
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