Pain and Gain. (15.)
Directed by Michael Bay.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Duwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub and Ed Harris. 129 mins
Pain & Gain is a dark comedy about dim criminals and an indictment of the shallow materialism of the American Dream made by Michael Bay, whose two decades in showbiz have been spent creating and defining the template for noisy, frantic summer blockbusters celebrating the shallow materialism of the American Dream. It’s like Hitler lecturing you on the evils of fascism and anti-Semitism – and not in some handwringing mea culpa but full on hectoring with his hand slamming on the table to emphasise the point. It’s such a furious invective that you suspect that the hectoring, rather than the message, is all that matters.
Made during a break between Transformers, P&G is the smallest scale film he’s ever made. It’s his version of Coen Brothers film; precisely it’s Michael Bay’s Fargo, relocated to the set of Miami Vice (TV version.) The dim criminals are muscle pumped fitness trainers but that aside the parallels are very close –it’s centred on an ill-conceived kidnapping; based on a true story and has macabre comic scenes of corpse disposal. Ed Harris’s private detective, who enters late on, is the equivalent of Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson.
Bad Boys II showed Michael Bay to have a jet black, nihilistic sense of humour and P&G is laughter in the dark, set in sun-drenched 90s Miami. Wahlberg is chillingly self-deluding as the gang's leader. Pumped up by the fortune cookie Nietzsche of self-help guru Ken Jeong who demands that he be “a doer not a donter,” he takes this as entitling him to kill and torture to get the slice of the pie that he is entitled to. Duwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays an ex-con who is trying to go straight and has found God but no real certainty. Just as in Southland Tales, seeing such a figure of sculpted perfection racked with doubt and being sheepishly gullible is very powerful.
The comparatively small budget means Bay doesn’t get to trash any cities, film any car chases and only gets to do one explosion. The bombast is still there though. There are even more bikini clad ladies and while the editing is slightly less frantic there is still plenty of slow motion – the film’s recurring visual motif is a virtual freeze frame of a mouth with saliva spraying forth during some physical exertion. As ever with Bay, no police force is ever deployed in groups of less than ten cars.
It isn’t a subtle film but it is no less heavy-handed than the critically praised Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly, which hammered its message home even harder. It’s still a fine film but a Brad Pitt film making an anti-capitalist message has no real frisson. When Bay, Wahlberg and The Rock turn on the American Dream that has quite an impact, seeing as they are the living embodiment of the idea that anybody, absolutely anybody can make it in the States. If those three, who have got more out of it than anybody else, don’t buy into it then you have to wonder if anyone does any more. This is the first Michael Bay movie where the flapping of the Stars and Stripes is ironic rather than triumphant.
Directed by Michael Bay.
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Duwayne Johnson, Anthony Mackie, Tony Shalhoub and Ed Harris. 129 mins
Pain & Gain is a dark comedy about dim criminals and an indictment of the shallow materialism of the American Dream made by Michael Bay, whose two decades in showbiz have been spent creating and defining the template for noisy, frantic summer blockbusters celebrating the shallow materialism of the American Dream. It’s like Hitler lecturing you on the evils of fascism and anti-Semitism – and not in some handwringing mea culpa but full on hectoring with his hand slamming on the table to emphasise the point. It’s such a furious invective that you suspect that the hectoring, rather than the message, is all that matters.
Made during a break between Transformers, P&G is the smallest scale film he’s ever made. It’s his version of Coen Brothers film; precisely it’s Michael Bay’s Fargo, relocated to the set of Miami Vice (TV version.) The dim criminals are muscle pumped fitness trainers but that aside the parallels are very close –it’s centred on an ill-conceived kidnapping; based on a true story and has macabre comic scenes of corpse disposal. Ed Harris’s private detective, who enters late on, is the equivalent of Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson.
Bad Boys II showed Michael Bay to have a jet black, nihilistic sense of humour and P&G is laughter in the dark, set in sun-drenched 90s Miami. Wahlberg is chillingly self-deluding as the gang's leader. Pumped up by the fortune cookie Nietzsche of self-help guru Ken Jeong who demands that he be “a doer not a donter,” he takes this as entitling him to kill and torture to get the slice of the pie that he is entitled to. Duwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays an ex-con who is trying to go straight and has found God but no real certainty. Just as in Southland Tales, seeing such a figure of sculpted perfection racked with doubt and being sheepishly gullible is very powerful.
The comparatively small budget means Bay doesn’t get to trash any cities, film any car chases and only gets to do one explosion. The bombast is still there though. There are even more bikini clad ladies and while the editing is slightly less frantic there is still plenty of slow motion – the film’s recurring visual motif is a virtual freeze frame of a mouth with saliva spraying forth during some physical exertion. As ever with Bay, no police force is ever deployed in groups of less than ten cars.
It isn’t a subtle film but it is no less heavy-handed than the critically praised Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly, which hammered its message home even harder. It’s still a fine film but a Brad Pitt film making an anti-capitalist message has no real frisson. When Bay, Wahlberg and The Rock turn on the American Dream that has quite an impact, seeing as they are the living embodiment of the idea that anybody, absolutely anybody can make it in the States. If those three, who have got more out of it than anybody else, don’t buy into it then you have to wonder if anyone does any more. This is the first Michael Bay movie where the flapping of the Stars and Stripes is ironic rather than triumphant.
