Pain & Gain Review

Made for a fraction of a Transformers budget between two of them, this is the closest Bay has come to a personal film, and it is a deeply uncomfortable one. The story is true. Three gym rats in mid nineties Miami abducted a businessman, tortured him for weeks, took everything he owned and later murdered a couple, and Bay tells it as a sun bleached comedy of idiots, with freeze frames, narration from four unreliable people at once and a lot of oiled muscle in slow motion.

Dwayne Johnson is the revelation, playing a born again ex convict whose faith and cocaine habit fight for control, and he is funnier and sadder than anything else in the filmography. The problem is that the film's contempt for these men looks exactly like admiration. The victim who survived, and the families of the two who did not, objected publicly to being background in a comedy. Bay never finds the distance the material needs, and the swagger he uses to mock swagger is indistinguishable from the real thing.