Boy Movies #31
Lyvie Scott on Pain & Gain
Today on Boy Movies we have an excellent guest issue by Lyvie Scott about Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, which stars Mark Wahlberg and The Rock and turns ten this year. Lyvie and I met on Twitter — a horrid place where I have nonetheless fostered a number of beautiful friendships — and her writing on film is always a treat to read. This is somehow the first issue of Boy Movies entirely dedicated to a Michael Bay joint, despite his status as the most boy director of all time. Everyone say thank you to Lyvie for correcting that!!! I absolutely loved this piece and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Calling all fitness fanatics
If you’re anything like me — a girl whose formative tastes were built by the boy movies of the early 2010s — there’s a chance you remember Pain & Gain, directed by Michael Bay.
A Michael Bay Film is one often characterized by its stupidity, and Bay’s tenth effort is no exception. I’m not here to disagree with that: Sometimes the haters are right, and sometimes, they’re really right. But Pain & Gain leans hard into that stupidity, and therein lies its beauty. It’s allowed to be stupid because its subject matter is, inherently, too bonkers even for Bay to dream up. The film follows the true story of a trio of personal trainers who one day decide to abduct and rob their richest client, and Bay goes to great lengths to remind us that he is not, in fact, embellishing any of the facts.
Pain & Gain is a straight-up tapestry of absurdity, but Bay is in strangely stellar form here. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is his best movie — it could have been, if he’d gotten out of his own way a bit — but it’s certainly the boy movie-est movie he’s ever made. Very sorry to Ambulance, Armageddon, and Bad Boys: Those are all still boy movies, as Bay is incapable of making a film of any other caliber. But Pain & Gain is different. Bay himself is different. Until this point in his career, his oeuvre wasn’t exactly varied — and after three Transformers films, two Bad Boys, and a bunch of self-serious superpatriot schlock, his signature style was overblown to the point of parody. Pain & Gain felt like the first time he was in on the joke… and also maybe the last time, too.
It all begins with Bay’s leading man. Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg, impossibly swole) has absorbed every jag-off motivational book into his system Kirby-style — but no matter how many vision boards he builds or entrepreneurial conferences he attends, he’s still at the bottom of the totem pole. Lugo is sooo done with being broke. He’s tired of training shrimpy guys who don’t lift a finger in real life, because they can afford not to. He’s tired of stretching sexy women out after their workouts and striking out with every single one of them. He’s a self-made man! They should be begging to have sex with him!
It’s not until he meets Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub, having the absolute time of his life) that he’s finally able to see his situation in a new light. For all his posturing about manifesting the life you want, Lugo has failed to take his own advice. He’s grown stagnant; while he spots dudes like Kershaw at the bench press (no weight racked, by the way: just the bar, bless him), life is passing him by. Meanwhile, Kershaw’s making money while he sleeps — worse, he’s taking it all for granted. So Lugo does what any self-made man would do, and cooks up a plan to make all of Kershaw’s wealth his own. Of course, he can’t pull off this coup alone, so he joins forces with his ‘roid-addicted associate (Anthony Mackie) and a newly sober ex-con (Dwayne Johnson) to form what will become the Sun Gym Gang.
I’m sure I could wax poetic about the themes at play in Pain & Gain, themes that Martin Scorsese would later unpack (and obviously, to greater success) in The Wolf of Wall Street. A lot of people, especially People on Letterboxd, like to point out how these two films came out within a few months of each other. And while I do love Uncle Marty, I don’t really care to unpack that. Nor do I care much for the bastardized American Dream that feels as much like a character in Pain & Gain as cocaine does. I really just wanna talk about The Rock.
Pain & Gain Rock is, to me, Peak Rock. Marky Mark is fine, as always, while Mackie is woefully underutilized — despite spouting such choice lines as “When these ‘roids kick into this chocolate mass, I’ll be unstoppable!” — but Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is absolutely in the pocket here. Dwayne was fresh off his career-making stint in Fast Five1, which basically means he had not yet learned how to throw his hulking weight around a movie set. It sounds ridiculous now, given how every film he’s since touched feels like it’s part of the same strange jungle universe, but Dwayne straight-up disappears into his role as Paul Doyle. More than that, he actually seems to be having fun here.
Doyle is actually a composite of three real-life members of the Sun Gym Gang, which is probably the very thing that makes him so damn interesting. He’s also a born-again Christian, which means the Rock is strutting around in “I Am On Team Jesus” T-shirts and trying to minister to the very guy his gang has held hostage. Things get complicated when he’s forced to start murdering people — and that’s also exactly when Pain & Gain goes from bafflingly smart satire to… well, a Michael Bay movie.
This year, Pain & Gain turns ten. That’s a crazy thought for me, a Florida girl who still remembers her visceral reaction upon seeing this film for the first time. I want to say Pain & Gain was the very first R-rated film that I saw in theaters. I was seventeen, I hadn’t lived in Florida proper for about six years, and I might have been a little homesick. I think I was hoping to feel some connection to the subject matter. I don’t know why I hoped for that, as Bay, for better or worse, has a sick way of capturing Miami in the mid ‘90s. Pain & Gain finds him neck-deep in his ideal world, giddily soaking up the sleaze and steroids that defined the era — and why shouldn’t he? Mid-’90s Miami is probably the one era where his licentious male gaze feels the least out of place. The inherent homoeroticism of body building is also 100% his bag, whether he’s conscious of it or not. But there’s also the sense that Bay is strangely out of his depth. Out of his comfort zone. Ironically, Pain & Gain was almost a really smart movie, but I’m not sure he had the tools to balance it with the quintessential Bayhem (that would come later, with Ambulance).
I so wish Pain & Gain was actually a courtroom drama. This doesn’t really make sense without having seen the film, but it’s got like, ten entirely different narrators. Lugo’s is the main voice guiding us through this incredibly strange and sad odyssey, but Kershaw, Doyle, and even his chirpy stripper girlfriend get the chance to guide the story as well. Ed Harris is also there, as detective Ed Du Bois, a sort of omniscient voice of reason looking back on this case from the future. It’s incredibly ridiculous, and one wonders if Bay was actually aware of just how it comes off in the finished product (in which case, slay) or had just seen Rashomon for the first time and really wanted to try the unreliable narrator thing. Either way, it’s completely lost in Bay’s gonzo format.
Am I reading too much into this? Perhaps, but I’m also still trying to make sense of my complicated feelings for this movie. When I first saw it, I was only just beginning to understand that not every film I’d sit down to watch would be one I’d enjoy — and ten years later, I may have finally gotten to the point where I can enjoy the good and at least laugh at the bad. Not saying Pain & Gain cured the miserable critic in me, but it definitely shut my mind off for a second. And if that’s not the essential perk of a boy movie, I’m not sure what is.
Here’s a piece of Lyvie’s that I love on one of my favorites, Jackie Brown.
Allison here: Just realized that this is the third issue in a row in which The Rock has been discussed. Boy Movies? More like Rock Movies.