Pain & Gain is the send off film that Tony Scott deserved. It takes the aesthetic that Tony Scott was working towards with Man on Fire, Deja Vu and Unstoppable and elevates it to the next level. Pain & Gain is also quite simply Michael Bay's finest film.
Throughout Bay's career he's pushed his style to the extreme, unfortunately culminating in some of the worst cinema around - the Transformers series. No matter what you think of Michael Bay's work, they've always appeared to be more style than substance. Whether it's the over the top slow motion shots of people getting out of cars, or illogical lens flares, Bay makes his case for the auteur theory pretty strong. His films are the origin of the orange and teal palette in Hollywood.
With Pain & Gain though, Bay's intense style fits perfectly. Where his style has always superseded any semblance of substance, Pain & Gain combines style and substance perfectly. It feels like the film that Bay has been working towards all along. The over the top characters of Bad Boys and the stylistic violence of The Rock come together perfectly in Pain & Gain.
Mark Wahlberg has always been an actor who is only as good as the director he's being directed by. For every Boogie Nights and The Fighter, there is a Rock Star or The Happening.
Wahlberg's Danny Lugo is an enjoyable character, one that wants to live in a world of excess. He is a personal trainer who wants the American Dream and the only way he knows how is to take it. After meeting up with Tony Shalhoub's Victor Kershaw, Lugo devises a plan to take Kershaw's money. The rest of the film continues with the plan Lugo has devised and does so brilliantly.
Fortunately with Pain & Gain, both Wahlberg and Bay are working with a script (written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely - The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Captain America) which actually works to tell a proper story rather than the usual Bay affair which is simply a set piece followed by narrative exposition followed by random set piece. Pain & Gain has its fair share of set pieces, but they actually further the plot along rather than delay it.
The sequence where the trio of idiots attempt to kill Kershaw and make it look like a suicide is hilarious and over the top, but it shows character and furthers the plot brilliantly. It's hard to tell whether this is because of the writers having written the scene properly, or an actual development in Bay's directing style, but regardless it's a great display of Bay doing violence properly - the slow reversal over Kershaw's face is cringe inducing and impactful.
There's a deep dark sense of humour with this film. It knows how to be fun and over the top whilst almost appearing to approve of the trio's actions - Danny Lugo, Dwayne Johnson's Paul Doyle and Anthony Mackie's Adrian Doorbal. Bay loves these characters, even with all their imperfections and stupid moves. He loves the madness of the situation and revels in the ripped bodies of the men, and even in the obese characters he litters around the place. For a story which is so mean spirited at times, it's great to see that Bay shoots all of his characters with respect and never actually look down on them - no matter how stupid their actions may be.
It's also great to see the mean spirited aspects being taken seriously and to their full extent. Some people may have problems with this, and these are probably the same people who had problems with the dead body chase scene in Bad Boys 2, but for others these are the things that made the film. Pain & Gain's use of Shalhoub's Kershaw as a punching bag is over the top, violent and without a doubt mean spirited, but it works perfectly.
The refreshing thing about Pain & Gain is the coherent action and coherent story - two things desperately lacking in previous Michael Bay films. Whether we'll see this continue on in future Bay films is questionable though as it appears his continuing on with the Transformers films means a continuation with incoherent action and plot. The comparison to late Tony Scott films is unmistakable - with the appearance of dialogue on the screen being one of the most prominent traits, as well as the reliance on that orange and teal look that Hollywood is gravitating to.
If every ten years Michael Bay pumps out a film like Pain & Gain or Bad Boys 2, then there'll be no arguments from this camp. For a year that has included such brilliant films as Zero Dark Thirty, Blue Jasmine and Rust & Bone, it's amazing to see a film like Pain & Gain come along and be right up there in quality.
1/2