The trailer for Pain and Gain made me unbelievably excited. It looked like an invigorating film. In fact...it made Pain and Gain my most anticipated film of the next couple of months. This took the place of Iron Man 3, The Great Gatsby, This Is The End and well, you get my point. Now that I've seen the film...I honestly can not say whether I loved it or hated it. It's a loud, scatter shot, ugly looking mess of a comedy. However, I also had a lot of fun with it and I found it effective and in some ways---completely brilliant.
The film (based on what the beginning narration calls "an unfortunately true story) follows Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg.) He runs Sun Gym in Miami, Florida and is greeted by a new member...Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub.) Kershaw is a complete jerk. He's a pretentious guy who no one can seem to get along with. Lugo notices this and decides to get his buddy, Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and recently released from prison Paul (Dwayne Johnson) to help him extort money from Victor as well as all of his assets. This leads to an incredibly hard to watch torture scene.
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It's almost as if director Michael Bay and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (the two of whom also wrote Captain America: The First Avenger and The Chronicles Of Narnia films) had no idea when to be funny and when to be serious. We get a subplot involving Paul's drug addiction interfering with his desire to be a good person. We get some incredibly uncomfortable scenes of torture as well as characters yelling at each other for no apparent reason. However, we also get some great comedy involving the antics of these criminals. Although they succeed at their crimes, these men do not have what it take to be criminals. This leads to some very funny scenes. There is one in particular involving a burger grill and body parts .
While this could have potentially made a great mix of comedy and drama...the film (for most of the time at least) mixed the two way too much. It was too self serious but at the same time very funny. This led to some strange universe of which only Pain and Gain exists. I've never seen a film that annoyed me so much and yet that I enjoyed to such a massive degree. Many of the techniques used in the film annoyed me such as the fact that most of the characters narrate the film at one point or another or that the film was incredibly in your face. However, I even found the annoying techniques effective. As well...some of the flaws of the film such as the fact that both Daniel and his crew and Victor are both incredibly unlikable people even work. Sure...this makes it so that there's no real person to root for and makes it so that you're just watching a movie about a bunch of jerks but it's also one of the reasons the film's a lot of fun.
I will end up recommending Pain and Gain. There is something very charming about the performances as well as the way the film's laid out. It's not a good film but it is a very enjoyable one and sometimes that's all you need to go to the cinema.
(3 out of 5 Stars, The film is rated R for bloody violence, crude sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use)
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