‘Pain and Gain’ has been described as Michael Bay’s most thought-provoking movie to date. Which, at first glance, appears not to be saying very much much: Bay’s movies usually annihilate thought (usually through a series of detonations) and ‘what was I thinking?’ must be a common question as the cinema-goer reels toward the exit.
In ‘Pain and Gain’ however, Bay seems to have stumbled across a script, based on a series of actual events, that exactly meets his criteria for what constitutes rad entertainment and mordant social commentary. This is both a revelation and a shock, because the ‘true’ events are violent, sordid abductions and murders and the satire appears to be at the expense of the lobotomized hyper-masculinity that has been Bay’s stock-in-trade since forever.
The movie denigrates everything it celebrates, and celebrates everything it mocks.
A talented cast participates in this lurid charade with gusto. Mark Wahlberg, who is never better than when playing very much dumber than he really is, resurrects both Marky Mark and Dirk Diggler in his performance as Daniel Lugo: a meat-head personal trainer whose devotion to a cracker-barrel personal philosophy in which success, fitness, greed, resentment, insecurity, amorality and faith are all grotesquely tangled leads him to kidnapping, torture, extortion, fraud and eventually murder.
Lugo appears to be thirty-something Dirk Diggler going mad with fear. My most vivid memory of ‘Boogie Nights’, apart from Walhberg’s notorious prosthetic, is the scene in which the newly prosperous Dirk wanders louchely around his new pad, pointing out its gruesome 70s stylings for the edification of an unseen observer: my shag carpeting, my curtains, my bar. The crimes in ‘Pain and Gain’ are motivated by a similar lust for cool stuff, and a belief that they are intrinsic to self-worth; that they express success and silence anxiety.
Not that out-sized prostheses do not appear in profusion. In ‘Boogie Nights’, we were persuaded to believe in the authenticity of Dirk’s equipment; the ‘gift’ that God had given him. Here, all the dicks are patently false. In a movie about musclemen, every other body part is enlarged and glorified at the expense of the penis, the primary joke is impotence.and sexual anxiety is pervasive. In a significant diversion from the facts of the case (which were beyond lurid to start with) the hostage (Tony Shaloub) is incarcerated in a warehouse filled with sex-toys for no other reason than that Michael Bay thinks dildos are gay and funny, and would like someone to be clubbed with one in his movie. On the other hand, it does result in a scene in which Dwayne (who must now be tired of being reminded that he was The Rock) Johnson looks perplexedly at a shelf of ponderous rubber cocks. I’m reminded of the line in ‘Fight Club’ where Helena Bonham Carter says to Brad Pitt of a dildo wobbling on a dresser: ‘Don’t worry: it’s not a threat to you’.
Except, I suppose, when you’re threatening someone with one.
Johnson is a very decent actor, with a fine control of his cartoon-handsome features, a wall-of-death grin, and an awesome body, (more chiseled, less puffy than that of his former incarnation.) Bay counters all this by identifying him as ‘the weak link’ (he has Jesus and makes laughable attempts to identify sin and lurch towards redemption as the dismembered bodies pile up around him,) Bay dresses him in ridiculous clothes, sprays him with green paint, shoots off his toe and make him a cocaine-fuelled priapus (he is the only character who is portrayed as sexually potent). He also, oh so hilariously, almost beats a thin, elderly, gay priest to death for making a move on him, evoking distasteful memories of a homophobic scene in ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (1982). Y’all know the one: ‘THUMP! Dat’s all yoo’ll eva need’
In many ways, this movie is still 1982. The Miami it evokes is the same stuccoed pleasure ground lit by day in dazzling sunshine; by night with parallel bars of fluorescent turquoise and pink, of Miami Vice and Scarface: a world of horizon pools, hard-eyed, hard-bodied strippers, tiny hilarious dogs and blow. One can imagine Michelle Pfeiffer striding in, all leg-warmers and cheekbones: straight out of a Nagel print.
In Bay’s movies, the body is a jigsaw: made to be disassembled, judged, and reassembled like a kit, or blown to fragments and rebuilt, like one of his Transformer robots. As bodybuilder’s ‘cut’ themselves to pieces and define themselves piecemeal: pectorals, deltoids, biceps, quads; Bay saws bodies to bits: a corpse for him is a sexual plaything (in one horrifically misjudged attempt at a joke, one of the gang is told to stop playing with the tits of a dead woman,) and a source of slapstick (see Bad Boys II’s infamous ambulance chase for no further explanation,) and whether it’s a ‘real’ toe in the mouth of a toy dog, silicone breast implants jiggling on a tray or hair caught in a chainsaw, there is no sense of wholeness: these people are all chopping themselves or each other to bits.
It therefore comes as no surprise that Johnson’s character is a composite and everything that happens to him (the dildoes, the gay-bashing, the coke, the botched robbery of an armored car) is total fabrication from beginning to end: Michael Bay’s ‘contribution’ to the facts. At one point, an onscreen caption alerts us to the non-fact that ‘This is still a true story’ at precisely the point when it is most false. Is this satire or mere confusion?
This pathological need to pump up a story already explosive with witless greed, incompetence and cruelty identifies Bay not as a cool commentator, but as one hopelessly enthralled by the excesses he refuses to merely document, but is compelled to supplement.
He is the director on steroids: his guns are sick, his mass is freaky and one is gravely concerned for the state of his internal organs.
Feel the Burn: Pain and Gain (MIchael Bay 2013)
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