Pain & Gain (** out of ****)

Pain & Gain is perhaps the strangest film I've seen all year. Not completely in the abnormal way but I really had no idea what to make of it. The first thirty minutes or so were dreadful. The pacing is so erratic I was more confused on a why a film would construct itself like this then actually what was happening. Every character is given a narration,  in making every character important, they made them irrelevant.  However the second half the film gets progressively better. Things slowed down a bit. It's also at this point things become incredibly dark. I'm still 100% sure what to make of it.

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) works as a fitness trainer in Miami Florida. He's tired of looking at people having wealth when he feels he should have it (yea he doesn't really have a good moral reason). He decides to kidnap a client he trains Victor (Tony Shalhob), a millionaire who's done some dirty dealing to gain his wealth. Daniel recruits fellow trainer Adrian (Anthony Mackie) and a former convict who trains at the gym, Paul (Dwayne Johnson). The three bumbling fools manage to pull off the kidnapping but a former cop (Ed Harris) won't let them get away with their crimes.

Besides the pacing is the odd story. It's based on a true story which is almost shocking since it looks like it was a story conceived by a Mark Wahlberg and John C. Reilly during their coked up phase of Boogie Nights (borrowed that line). The characters leap back and forth on the sympathetic line, which isn't neccisarily bad, but by the end I was just hoping the Ed Harris, the one sane man here, would win. I mean Mark Wahlberg is really the villian when you get down to the brass tax. He organizes a kidnapping to steal Victor's life and wants to kill the man without a second thought. I think this was the intnet of Michael Bay, but I could be wrong. It is a Bay film so it's longer then it should be and contains no compelling female characters. Yet it only has like two explosions, What's going on with Bay?! I did find some some scenes quite amusing, the comedy is absurd in the unusual way (a coked of Dwayne Johnson making a mess of Mark Wahlberg's "nerighborhood watch" rape seminar being one such scene). The story might is so out there it might have made for a surreal Paul Thomas Anderson film. Pain & Gain is Bay having some fun and doing something different but the man still has some structural problems in his career.

** out of ****