Pain & Gain

A dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.

It's like a giant sculpture that is so strange and off-putting, it's instantly, intriguingly post-modern. Swept up in the film's pile-driving self-assurance, even Bay-haters may absorb the pain to enjoy the gain.

Michael Bay goes back to a Bad Boys budget and a big boys’ rating, for a true-life crime story that’s inconsistent and frenetic, but also funny and wilfully outrageous.

That sense of extreme, excess, over-the-top everything is there from start to finish. And isn't that what Bay fans count on even at cut-rate prices?

Yes, the canon invoked for this film is that of the Three Stooges, but it’s still not as magnificently berserk as they can be. Set your expectations carefully for this one.

The whole thing is played for laughs that almost never come. To be sure, the film has its moments, but they’re few and far between.

Michael Bay's absurdist comedy is all pain, no gain and an utter monstrosity. It may be the most unpleasant movie I've ever seen, and I'm not forgetting "Freaks," which Pain & Gain resembles, come to think of it.

Simply a crazy movie. About a lot more than just moving iron up and ****'s about motivation, perseverance, and a will to rise above yourself. The music they had in the movie was hilarious, and they had they same theme playing for a long time. It was very different and moving, Also it has comedy, babes, and action, what more could a guy want.

I honestly quite enjoyed this movie. A bit ridiculous and frustrating at times, like some of the cinematography, was annoying, but nonetheless it was a solid film. Not very good, but not very bad. These guys were so damn stupid though hahaha I've watched this movie 3 times since it came out in 2010 and I think it's just one of those movies you watch once in a while.

Michael Bay's latest is a movie full of curious contradictions. It’s a grubby little indie story told with all the whoosh and whizz-bang of a summer tentpole. It’s a sort of goofy GoodFellas, based — unbelievably — on a true story, that is simultaneously satirical and moralistic about the American Dream. And it shifts hugely between the compulsive and the indulgent. If one thing’s for sure, it’s this: Pain & Gain is never dull. Bay’s big problem is himself. You don’t get to become a brand name in yourself (his movies have made over $4.5 billion now) and then get to deliver your “smaller” projects in relative anonymity. Not unless you’re J. K. Rowling, that is. It would have been fascinating to have seen how Pain & Gain would have been received (it was released in the US in the spring, to below-average reviews) had it had another director’s name on the poster. Just as with Rowling, who published her new crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pen-name Robert Galbraith, and received considerably better notices than for her first venture outside Hogwarts, Bay’s left-turn would most likely have been better appreciated. The movie’s other problem lies in the real-life story (adapted from a series of articles from the Miami New Times) it is based on, which is so deliriously absurd it requires Bay to wryly and wittily observe with an opening title card, “Unfortunately, this is a true story,” and later, come its crackpot climax, follow-up with another stating simply: “This is still a true story.” Seemingly invigorated by a budget on a par with the one he had for Bad Boys, and his first relatively grown-up certificate since that movie’s sequel, Bay goes to town with the material, delivering some mesmerisingly arch images — the high point being a shot of Mark Wahlberg in a swimming pool, his body size beautifully and scarily distorted beneath the water — and some cartoonish violence, barbecuing body parts and squishing skulls with an abandon that suits the story’s pumped-up excess. His cast, meanwhile, embrace the grotesquerie with muscle-bound arms. Wahlberg plays Daniel — a man who considers being fat “more than sickening. It’s unpatriotic” and who has a six-year-old’s grasp of geography — with a coked-up, psychotic naivety, his life-philosophy the perfectly, and necessarily, simple: “Be a doer, not a don’t-er.” With his victim Tony Shalhoub’s revolting self-made millionaire — a man prone to statements such as, “You know who invented salad? Poor people” — Daniel’s dimwit accomplices are portrayed with joyful knowingness by Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson. The former thinks he’s a stud, yet has a **** made useless by steroid abuse. The latter thinks he’s a born-again Christian but is actually a psychopath. Both manage to make Daniel look like Einstein. The movie is loads of fun, inventive and sharp when it’s introducing us to its brainless musketeers, but then gets flabby once the story proper kicks in. This is particularly true in a middle third that can’t seem to decide what point it is trying to make and which will do nothing to convince the Bay detractors that he’s capable of making a movie without sticking a camera up some hot girl’s skirt. It’s a shame, because for the most part there is plenty to like, and it’s proof that even when not operating under gargantuan budgets and manipulating giant robots, Bay has an eye for the spectacular and an ear for the anarchic. It’s Bayhem on a budget. But Bayhem all the same. And Amen to that. Michael Bay goes back to a Bad Boys budget and a big boys’ rating, for a true-life crime story that’s inconsistent and frenetic, but also funny and wilfully outrageous.

I didn't know if this movie was meant to be a comedy or not. But, I didn't find it funny. The beginning was the highlight of the movie, but half way through the movie. It fell apart.

Was ready for it to be over halfway through. The characters get annoying quickly and it feels like the movie is stuck in the mud early on. The stab at humor is ridiculously lacking. Michael Bay being Michael Bay, basically.