Pain & Gain

Tony Scott is in God’s truth and so the throne for the king of sexy filtered filmmaking is once again at the disposal of one man. I never expected Michael Bay to confirm his status as a conversational crime comedy even in my wildest dreams, which is mainly due to the brilliantly absurd script, excellent actors, and the director's obvious desire to make something for his own entertainment. This is definitely the best Michael Bay film since... well, since The Rock. (29.08.2013)

How do you combine irony, distance, fun and shock? Don't ask Michael, he doesn’t know. The problem of Pain and Gain can be summed up in one sentence: for this type of film to work, it needs to be smarter than its characters. And it's not. The director has no distance, the escalating dementia of everything and everyone excuses the genre of black comedy and the complete imbalance of tone of the popular alibi that reality is "stranger than fiction". But it is not in this form. Everything that is strange and unsettling about this story was melted by Bay in a sweaty muscular goulash, all the dynamics of which lie in the constant movement of the camera and grotesque performances that do not have a shred of integrity in them (just like the entire script). How does one make it so that all the pain brings some gain, other than superficial tabloid entertainment? This equation is beyond Bay's capabilities. (31.07.2013)

I was really looking forward to watching Pain & Gain. Bay made it out of pure love for cinematography. To be able to make this, he signed up for making the fourth Transformers, and he put the Rock and Mark Wahlberg into it. I really like these two, so one beautiful sunny day I decided to go to the cinema, expecting to enjoy nice actors, great action, fun and amusement. And that’s not quite what I got, and I must admit that I keep mulling this over. The actors are not the problem. Mark Wahlberg is as hunky as probably never before, while the Rock is playing what is probably the most distinctive role of his career. The problem lies in the story. There is no one to root for. Everybody in this movie is a bastard. Moreover, this film is full of absolutely brutal dark humor. That wouldn’t be that bad, because I like this type of humor and usually have no problems with it. The problem comes when it begins to brutally cross the line. The line is crossed by the spectacular action, shot with a very decent, even though sometimes rather shaky camera, but also by the humor, which I couldn’t even get in the end. (15.08.2013)

A similarly absurd spectacle to the Coen brothers' legendary Fargo. It's so bizarre, cynical and aptly ironic, so politically incorrect, so dehumanisingly testoste-packed, that in a perverse sort of way it's impossible not to like it. Moreover, it brutally kicks the ass of the notorious idea of the American dream of a land of unlimited possibilities, where everything can be achieved with diligence and ambition. The tragicomic figures with a dumbbell and a dollar sign for a brain, accurately portrayed by Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, were a delight to watch. I’ve never been and I am not a fan of Michael Bay, he’s never known, and still doesn't know, moderation in his films, but here he actually turned this unfortunate trait into something unexpected: his best film. (10.08.2013)

Any chance of something smarter and more satirical is erased by the fact that Michael Bay is in the director’s chair, a creator with the mentality, the taste and the ethical views of a 10 year-old kid. Pain and Gain is the embodiment of what I despise in films: romanticisation of wretched characters, worship of violence, shooting from the hip and primitive humour. The argument that the movie is actually a critique of its stupid, primitive and shallow characters is only a cheap excuse for those who want justify to themselves the sad fact that they believe that all that blunt corporeality and jokes at the expense of fat people, gays and immigrants, and the glorification of violence are cool. Just like Bay. (12.08.2013)