I was asked recently why I hate Michael Bay, so I should probably take this opportunity to clarify that I have absolutely nothing against him as a person or director. I’ve enjoyed some of his movies and we even have mutual friends. However I will admit that I’ve had some trouble with his recent cinematic output. For me... the Transformers movies just felt they were being handled more and more in the wrong way – that a children’s toy had been taken and quickly turned into a film franchise that seemed to be worshiping at the altar of streamlined bodywork – both human and mechanical. Amid the requisite explosions and robot-on-robot slugfests, the cameras lingered on breasts and butts as much as they did on gear-sticks. The story that Megan Fox auditioned for her original role by coming over to Bay’s house and washing his car seems utterly believable and told you everything about the 'adult' concept on show. One shudders in horror with what Bay would have done with the Weebles.
My reply to the charge of Bay-hating was that he was fine at action if that’s ALL you wanted but I simply wished he’d do the kind of ‘R/18’movies that he clearly wanted to make rather than turning other supposedly all-ages films into them – that left to his own creations he could create ninety minutes of all-out action, over-the-top antics. After all, he’d previously brought us the likes of The Rock and Armageddon, perfectly acceptable over-the-top nonsense that was absolutely great for the summer season without terminally numbing the brain cells.
Watching Bay’s latest Pain & Gain is an abject lesson in being careful what you wish for because frankly - even though devoid of any sci-fi elements - it makes Transformers: Dark of the Moon look like it was robbed of an Academy Award for Best Picture Ever.
If this is Bay without restraint – and I think we should agree from the start that it is – then what he’s managed to bring to the screen is an incoherent, rambling mess. It begins in such a way that you think you might be in for a clever satire along the lines of Shane Black’s vastly superior Kiss-Kiss-Bang-Bang and it’s a good half hour before that little voice in the back of your head starts to yell that it’s nothing of the sort. No, perhaps this is a film that doesn’t expect to be taken seriously - it is, after all, based on a real-life event and a group of bizarrely inept petty criminals - but neither is it a movie with anything to say… except perhaps ’Anyone remember when Dwayne Johnson was actually getting great roles and didn’t have a physique that makes him look like a deformed Hulk?’ (Seriously, check out the poster for 2004’s Walking Tall and compare to recent releases- it's frightening…)
Like a Hunter S Thompson cocktail of LSD and steroids, this is an OD'd ode to excessive ambition and rank stupidity with the excuse that it’s telling the unlikely true story of a group of people who excelled at both. That may well be true - and truth can be stranger than fiction - but Bay has taken the likes of Wahlberg, Johnson, Mackie along with Tony Shalhoub, Ed Harris and Peter Stormare and wasted their collective talents - giving them nothing to work with but pure caricature, abject farce, blatant misogyny and ever-decreasing logic. It feels like a vanity project written large and even those worshiping at the altar of the perfect physique are likely to feel they've been given a raw deal.
Even as a beer-and-pizza outing, Pain & Gain feels disappointingly self-indulgent and testosterone-driven to a fault. This is one bloated outing that Gym won’t fix.
