Watched Pain & Gain yesterday.
Daniel Lugo (Wahlberg) convinces his dim-witted fitness instructor buddy Adrian Doorbal (Mackie) about how life's been dealing them a shitty hand for too long, and that they ought to take matters into their own hands and do something about it. The plan is to kidnap a rich Jewish businessman whom Daniel has been training at the Miami Sun Gym, then toture the poor fella until he's willing to sign off all of his eartly belongings to the guys. Lugo even deems this act perfectly just. Afterall the man hasn't been working out hard enough and is therefor deeply unpatriotic and just a plain bad person. He doesn't deserve the American dream. In order to pull the job off, they seek the help of some extra muscle in the recently converted convict Paul Doyle (a ridiculously juiced-up yet still utterly charmismatic Dwayne The Rock Johnson) It doesn't go quite as planned though, and the man figures out the identity of his captors thanks to Lugo's shitty Cologne. Now they need to get rid of him permanently. Not and easy feat when your hired muscle has found god and basically swore off violence entirely. So despite their worst intentions, the captor manages to survive afterall. It all goes even more sideways from there, as cokaine-fueled arrogance gets the best of the three idiots; toes are being shot off; people get their heads crushed beneath barbells; and cheap Chinese chainsaws prove to be a poor choice for taking human bodies apart.
I don't really get the utter contempt that's generally being leveled at the movie. I also don't get the reverence from a select few critics. I heard people complain about how Bay glorifed the 3 idiots, their superficiality and their crimes, but I never got that impression from the movie at all. Bay makes fun of them all the way through (and of his own body of work for that matter. Maybe even his audience), and we're laughing at them. Never with them. Even Bay's trademark humor that's equal parts casual racism, sexism and dick jokes came across as oddly fitting for a change.
My biggest beef with the film was the bloated 130-minutes running time that's now become a staple of every Bay movie. For a satire about superficiality and physical perfection, there was certainly an awful lot of fat and filler on display, but maybe that was the point all along. Either way, it was certainly boring for extended stretches of its running time and nowhere near as edgy and outrageous as Bay probably thought it was, so I'm only giving it a very mild thumbs down.
