Starring Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Mackie,Dwayne Johnson, and Tony Shalhoub the movie follows how three bodybuilders got entangled in a kidnapping scheme that goes really wrong.
In between scenes of the muscleheads torturing their victim, Bay indulges his taste for treating women as sluts and grisly brutality as a nifty excuse for a cheap laugh.
The most shocking thing about the new Michael Bay film is... not the orange, grunting criminals pumping a) iron, b) fists and c) other people, but the gradual realisation that this could be Bay's most intellectual film yet.
The first hour may be Bay's career high point: it's fast, freaky, gloriously tasteless and startlingly pointed in its attacks on western insecurity, shallowness and greed.
It's official. Michael Bay, director of the Transformers clobberfests, knows how to make movies about humans, too. The problem is, he thinks humans are robots.
Maybe he's trying to do 'GoodFellas'-style dark comedy (the copious voice-overs would certainly suggest it), but put as charitably as possible, Bay is no Scorsese.
Now [Bay] hits new levels of both artistry and sleaziness in the black comedy Pain & Gain, which I strongly recommend if you don't overvalue taste, subtlety, and moral decency. I liked it.
