More pain than gain

One of my favorite truisms is truth is frequently stranger than fiction. Often, the truth also makes for a better story.

Pain and Gain is a movie based on actual events which were documented in a true crime piece in The Miami New Times of the same name. The actual story has plenty of compelling material, and it’s no surprise it was adapted for the screen.

Unfortunately, Pain and Gain has an incredibly uneven tone, and some of the decisions made in this adaptation are inept at best, and offensive at worst.

The movie begins with Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), the fitness-obsessed, bodybuilding manager of the Sun Gym in Miami.

Daniel is a bombastic proponent of the American dream, but feels like he’s stuck in his current economic and social situation. So, he comes up with a plan: Kidnap his wealthy client Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) and force him to sign over everything he owns.

Enlisting the help of his friends Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), Daniel goes about seizing his dream, and the results are horrifying.

To put things in context, the real Lugo and Doorbal are currently on death row in Florida; (the Paul Doyle character was an amalgamation of multiple different people). Convicted of murder, they also tortured businessman Marc Schiller for a month, threatening his family and forcing him to sign over all his assets, before unsuccessfully trying to kill him.

All of this happened in the early 1990s, and, aside from the two murder victims, almost everyone involved with the case is still alive.

Making a movie about horrific events that happened relatively recently isn’t easy, and choosing to include comedic elements makes such a job all the harder. Still, it’s not an impossible task, it just requires a deft touch.

Unfortunately, Pain and Gain was directed by Michael Bay, and deft has never been a word used to describe him.

I don’t dislike Bay as a rule. Indeed, I liked Bad Boys II and even though the Transformers movies will probably always make me a little leery of his work, I do enjoy his penchant for stylization.

That being said, if you have a visceral dislike for his approach to movie making, you are going to hate Pain and Gain, as it’s full of slow motion, panning shots and other Bay signatures.

These elements didn’t bother me in and of themselves, but they are a contributing factor to the film’s bizarre and uneven tone.

The movie tries to walk the fine line between drama and comedy, but all attempts to strike a balance just end up looking clunky.

It shifts focus regularly, and it’s as if it can’t make up its mind on what kind of film it wants to be: Is it a dark comedy? Is it a true crime piece? Are we supposed to sympathize with the perpetrators? The victims? Neither?

With better execution, a project like this could have worked out, but the result here is simply a failure.

Then there are the alterations Pain and Gain made to the actual story.

Obviously, when adapting any account, some things will need to be changed to make the final product more cinematic. But, when your tagline is, “This is a True Story” and the events happened relatively recently, I think some care with the facts is in order.

Unfortunately, Pain and Gain plays as fast and loose with the public record as it does with its tone.

The Sun Gym gang is portrayed as a group of savage innocents, longing for lives that are out of their grasp. This is in sharp contrast to the real Lugo, who amassed around $1 million  from a Medicare fraud scheme before the kidnapping and torture ever began.

Then there are the victims themselves, whom are made to look vulgar, unsympathetic and sleazy.

Yet, in the Miami New Times story, the victims are described as good and generous people, who in no way deserved what they were subjected to.

I can see why the filmmakers decided to make these changes, but I still think they are distasteful.

The movie also decides to fetishize the body building aspects of the gang. This fetishism was also an obnoxious thread in the Miami New Times story, and it’s even more annoying here, where it’s given greater prominence.

The last thing I have to say about this film is I hope “The Rock” is in a good movie someday. Johnson is probably the best thing about this movie, despite being given a bizarre character in an even more bizarre script, and I’d really like to see his talents put to use in something actually good.

Honestly, if you want to see this, you should read the Miami New Times story “Pain and Gain” instead. It’s an excellent work of literary journalism, it’s available online, and it’ll take you about as much time to read as it will to watch this deeply flawed film.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on May 9, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Columns,Movie Reviews,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry