All Pain, No Gain

Bay tries true-story comedy without apparently checking what he was sending up

Returning to my abode after the festivities I decided to catch up on some terrible film trailers. Yes I got some presents, thank you very much. Usually my go to are the horror trailers on IMDB's Coming Soon link (the Android app, incidentally, is about 1.5648043043 million times better than it used to be - no more pointless clicking!) which is now handily showcased in a swipe-able reel across the top of the app. And here was trailer #1: oh my God. Pain and Gain.

 

Initial thoughts - sunbleached California, gigantic Mark Wahlberg yelling at himself, 'BASED ON A TRUE STORY' - I rolled my eyes, sniggered and ate the crumbs off of my t-shirt. Classic Bay Film - this one appeared to be about some superhulk who was such a master criminal an entire branch of armed LAPD officers were needed to bring him down. So far, so embarrassing. But then:

You ever just get tired of being where you are Adrian?"
Two things about this line:

1. This line was so awful in substance and tone it was off the chart in cringeworthiness. Even for Michael Bay.
2. It was delivered following a barbell being smashed to the gym floor in supremely adolescent style. Verdict: Sixth form existential crisis alert.

You'd associate both of these with Bay - his films (or "films" as at least one reviewer probably refers to them) reek of testosterone and this is classic repressed male adolescence territory. I was kind of surprised that this was Bay's first film set in a gym - and then it hit me. The FML guitar, the ridiculous physiques, the atypical woman's existence validated by man vibe - "there you go, yeeeaaheeaahh!" croons an arm-flexing Wahlberg to a sycophant gym-ho - it all adds up.

Michael Bay has Googled himself on the Internet. And this time he actually read the results.

I watched more, now perversely fascinated. My unbelieving eyes saw Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson appear (with a really weird vein in his shoulder area). I like him because he never takes himself, or indeed anything, seriously - exactly how a multimillionaire beefcake should act. Another nail in the Bay persona? Everything Johnson does is deeply silly. Was he trying to ironize himself? A crazy thought.

More follows. In brief: a kidnap of a millionaire gym owner (Tony Shalhoub) who thinks vegetables are for poor people (again when the hell did Bay start doing sendups of his own characters?) in awful superhero suits and then Ed Harris - Ed Harris - as... what? I couldn't figure it out. A mobster, reclaiming his role from Cronenberg's A History of Violence? An off-duty cop? I paused and went to my Wikipedia app (their new update is terrible. Crashes all the time!) to look this up.

And then I learnt this really was a true story and that in fact the characters Wahlberg and Johnson play are awaiting death sentences in Miami for kidnap and extortion.

So this was a comedy sending up two men about to be executed in real life. Makes Zero Dark Thirty look like a bastion of impartiality doesn't it. And my vision of a post-Enlightenment Michael Bay dragged back to the Dark Ages, by... Michael Bay. When will he learn?