REVIEW: Michael Bay's Physically Punishing 'Pain & Gain' Is 'Fargo' By Way Of The Three Stooges
The large-scale destructiveness he has previously wrecked upon public and private property (including entire cities), Michael Bay visits on the human body in Pain & Gain, a pulverizing steroidal farce based on a bizarre-but-true kidnapping-and-murder case. Suggesting Fargo by way of the Three Stooges, Bay’s latest certainly proves that the Transformers auteur does have something more than jacked-up robots on his mind: specifically, jacked-up muscle men who will stop at nothing to achieve their deeply twisted notion of the American dream. With a very fine ensemble cast recruited to play an array of overtly despicable characters, this unapologetically vulgar, sometimes quite funny, often stomach-churning bacchanal will surely prove too extreme for great swathes of the multiplex crowd. But the marquee value of topliners Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, plus the pic’s reportedly modest $25 million pricetag, spells more gain than pain for Paramount’s box office pecs. more »
