Pain and Gain

Pain and Gain

Pain and Gain is a crime comedy film starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson.

Now this movie is directed by Michael Bay and he is a polarised director. Meaning that people love him or hate him. Most people love him because of his high budget films and tons of explosions. He is of course the man behind the Transformers franchise as well as the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which will be out in August.

But that’s also why people hate him as they say he forsakes decent story telling just to pack a film with tons of action and explosions.

But then we have this film which is slightly different from Michael Bay’s usual style of filming. You can literally count the amount of explosions in this film on one hand, as there is only one explosion in the whole film.

But anyway, lets get to the film, so the movie is based on a true story about a man named Daniel Lugo who is a fitness trainer and works at a gym called the Sun Gym. He is able to recruit two more body builders and forms a gang which later becomes known as the Sun Gym Gang. Basically what happens is they become involved in kidnaping wealthy people, they extort, torture and eventually murder them all for money.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the film:

It was far too silly, some of the humour looked like it belonged on iCarly or one of those silly Disney shows, I just couldn’t take it seriously, Dwayne Johnson is a typecast actor, meaning he suits real hard core action where he is able to take on a more serious role, not in an attempted comedy role. I say attempted as Michael Bay seems to have missed his Mark on this one. He also did Bad Boys 1 and 2 which were quite successful, but for some reason it just doesn’t work in this film. I suppose it has to do with the fact that he tried taking a real life story of tragedy and violent crimes and tried to turn it into something funny, which almost seems insensitive, that and he just had the wrong choice of cast members.

What I did like about the film is even though it is flawed there are some parts in the movie where it is quite entertaining and I was able to let out a chuckle every now and then. I loved the fact that Ken Jeong makes a cameo in the film and is at least able to make his entire segment quite funny. Ken Jeong is the guy who plays Leslie Chow in the Hangover and Senor Chang in the TV show Community.

So with that in mind, Pain and Gain gets a painful 4 out of 10. 

Remember to click on the title to hear the audio version of this review