Pain and Gain (2013) Review

“Pain and Gain”

Michael Bay is tough to like. He makes the kinds of movies I like (crazy action movies), and yet with a few exceptions I don’t like most of his movies. I found the first “Bad Boys,” first “Transformers,” and “The Island” enjoyable, but the only one I could say was good was “The Rock.” All his other movies ranged from average (“Armageddon”) to painfully terrible (“Transformers 2”). With a stroke of luck though, his new movie, “Pain and Gain,” overcame the trepidation that comes with him and came out as easily his best movie since “The Rock.”

Much of this can be attributed to the fact that “Pain and Gain” is based on a true story, and one that proves to be an engagingly loopy one filled with muscle-bound protagonists and pitch-black comedy. Three bodybuilders, fed up with being on the outs, decide to rob a millionaire whom they believe doesn’t deserve his success. For the ringleader, Daniel Lugo, his rationale is that this man doesn’t care much about exercise while him and his cohorts Paul and Adrian do.

These three are perhaps the most self-absorbed, narcissistic and dim-witted main characters to come by in a long time. The key difference here, and why this one works better than many of Bay’s previous movies, is that we aren’t supposed to like them. One of big problems I have with Bay’s movies is that we are supposed to like characters that are doing horrible/annoying things (the cheeriness that Marcus and Mike have while driving over dead bodies in “Bad Boys 2” for instance). Here, there isn’t that pretense. Daniel, Paul and Adrian are terrible people, and we laugh at their antics, not with them. When they cross the line from the already bad extortion and torture into flat-out murder, these guys have what’s coming to them.

Even with though their actions are reprehensible, “Pain and Gain” finds plenty to laugh at in their general boneheaded nature. In this regard, The Rock (sorry Dwayne, you will always be known as The Rock to me) completely steals the movie as the Jesus loving, coke-snorting maniac that is Paul. His mannerisms and ways of speaking, especially when coked out of his mind, frequently got some of the best laughs out of me.

Still, this not to disregard Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie’s work as Daniel and Adrian respectively. Mackie unfortunately gets the shaft compared to Wahlberg and Johnson, although he gets his moments to shine every now and then. Wahlberg, meanwhile, is lucky enough to not only have good comedic timing, but also many of the scripts more memorable lines. In fact, surprisingly for a Michael Bay movie, the script by “Captain America” writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is the best thing about it. I was shocked at how many hilarious quotes were sticking in my mind after the movie finished.

While “Pain and Gain” definitely contains more good than bad, its weaknesses are familiar to those in other Bay movies. The most obvious is that it is much too long. Bay still hasn’t learned that not every movie needs to push its way over the two-hour mark, especially when it’s a comedy with scenes that don’t add to the movie in any significant way. One where Wahlberg heads up a neighborhood watch could have easily been just an amusing Blu-ray deleted scene. Also, the multiple scenes of damaged millionaire Kershaw dealing with a diarrhea-prone patient mate in the hospital were not only unnecessary, but just plain gross when the movie didn’t need to rely on such low-brow material.

There’s also the matter of an overabundance of narration. It would have been fine had it only been used for Daniel, Paul and Adrian, but other minor characters get their own scenes too when they would have been better without it. Narration can be a useful storytelling tool, but an overreliance on it can be a cheap crutch, and giving it out to too many characters is erratic and jarring.

Still, even with this unevenness that is typical of Bay’s other movies also, “Pain and Gain” mostly succeeds because of the fine cast assembled here (I’ll give this to Bay, he knows how to put together a great cast of character actors, including Ed Harris and Tony Shalhoub) and the absurd story that provides it with so much material to mine. A word of warning, the trailer makes it look like an action comedy, whereas it really is just a super dark comedy with small bits of action. And as a no-boundaries type of comedy, it largely works, even some bloat and excess keeping it from totally soaring.

3/4

Battle: Los Angeles (2011) Review

Battle: Los Angeles

Battle: Los Angeles is only a science fiction film on the surface. The movie is really a war film with aliens in the place of human beings and the fight taking place on American soil rather than a foreign country. This premise is an intriguing take on the alien invasion genre, stripping it of the glossy gadgetry that is typically associated with it and giving the genre a Cloverfield-style gritty shakeup. Now, District 9 took the same approach, but that movie used the style in a way that compliments its message and story. Battle: Los Angeles uses that approach in order to give audiences a straightforward action movie with aliens by way of Black Hawk Down.

Plot Synopsis: After a meteor shower is soon identified as an alien invasion, the U.S. Army and the Marines set up bases to defend the ocean bordered cities from further damage. In Los Angeles, Staff Sergeant Nantz is assigned to a platoon being sent into the Santa Monica area for evacuation purposes. However, they find themselves overwhelmed by the extraterrestrial presence and the mission soon turns into an escape from the city.

It’s an admirably straightforward plot, without being overburdened by any unnecessary side tangents, but executed in a way that is uninvolving and occasionally slapdash. The action scenes are shot in the shaky-cam style that can work if done right, but can also be annoying if done wrong. Director Jonathon Liebesman puts forth a valiant effort, although he ends up wallowing in the method too much, shooting the action in almost exclusively close ups and having his editor chop the scenes in ways that confuse and disorient the viewer, but not in the way that they were probably intending. Even simple dialogue scenes are done this way and when a scene arrives where we should be able see an alien clearly as its being dissected, I ended up “fighting” with the camera and editing just to get a clear and simple glance of how it looks. From what I could make out, the alien design and their other weaponry are cool to look at, but feel more than a little inspired by the scrambled-junk look of District 9s Prawns and their ships. 

If they remind you too much of Skyline, don’t hold that against the movie because some of the special effects artists who worked on this went off to create Skyline after finishing their work here (and managed to release that movie before it too). That said, a couple of the action set pieces do work despite the fast-and-loose technique, notably an attack on top of a freeway and the final standoff against a larger threat (which succeeds despite a grossly unexplained plot hole in the setup). The dirty feel of the combat is also a refreshing juxtaposition against the otherworldly technology of the aliens. Liebesman wants to achieve the Jaws effect of keeping the enemy hidden or seen from far away, and he mostly accomplishes that in the battle scenes.

Just as with any other movie of this type (such as Independence Day), the characters within the story are bound to be labeled as stereotypes, and sure enough we have the rookie, the soon-to-be-married soldier, etc. The best examples of movies that use stereotypical characters do so in ways that help them be distinctive from one another. The problem with Battle: Los Angeles is that once the introductory scenes are finished and the battle commences, the characters are so bland and interchangeable that it’s easy to forget who’s who. Only Aaron Eckhart stands out as Staff Sergeant Nantz, who is the only person given some level of depth to work with in addition to being the most talented actor of the bunch, presenting enough conviction to the role that you might miss the bad dialogue he has to spout off (which there is plenty of).

With only the most minimal emotional investment in the characters and action scenes that range from competently done to incomprehensible, Battle: Los Angeles doesn’t do its worthwhile premise any favors. With a script rewrite and less hyper-caffeinated editing, this could have been a rousing action spectacle that puts a gritty spin on the alien invasion flick. At this stage, it’s an unimaginative, occasionally exciting romp with no one to root for. It’s not bottom of the barrel bad, but it rests somewhere in the lower end of mediocre. 

1.5/4