Pump up the pain
True story hits home with big stars and brutal crimes
Pain and Gain
DIRECTOR Michael Bay made his name in big, flashy thrillers such as The Rock, Armageddon and his Transformers series, but in this film, he takes on a true story about violence and corruption in a gym in Miami.
It all began in 1999, when a journalist, Pete Collins, wrote a series of articles for the Miami New Times, in which he revealed the muscle cult of one particular gym, The Sun Gym, where the athletes were using steroids and other substances to enhance their already massive bodies.
Collins focused on four men. At the centre of it all was Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), who served time in prison for perpetrating fraud within Medicare, America’s federal system of health insurance.
Once released, he attends a “change your life” seminar, in which the flashy motivational speaker, played by Ken Jeong, exhorts his followers to become “doers” not “watchers”.
Thus inspired, Lugo goes to the Sun Gym, where he persuades the greedy owner, John Mese (Rob Corddry), that he could double his income at the gym.
Somehow, Lugo keeps his promise and, within six weeks, the gym’s membership has tripled and Lugo is running the gym. Soon, extravagant, self-serving schemes are being hatched. Meanwhile, some shady characters are hanging around, just waiting for the weakest bad guy to fall so one of them can take his place.
Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) is a cocaineaddicted convict who has turned to religion. His conversion, however, does not last long. A priest tries to help him, but that ends in violence,
Meanwhile, Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie) is so hopelessly addicted to steroids that he is sexually impotent, which drives him into a fury of anger and shame.
From that point onwards, chaos erupts but a solution seems to appear in Ed Du Bois (Ed Harris), a retired private investigator who decides to take this posse of felons and fools into custody, but even this leads to another brutal event.
As nasty as the film is, these swaggering stars deliver their performances in high style. In fact, I think Bay has reshaped his swift sci-fi ideas to fit into the real world. He sets up the kind of action sequences that made the Transformers films so popular, but in Pain and Gain there are no robots — just killers, drug dealers, hookers and one honest sheriff who takes them all on.
The film did not score highly with the critics but I guess there’s an audience for big stars such as Wahlberg and Johnson, and the fights and car chases are sharply staged.
Pain and Gain is not going to win awards or make much money, but it will find its own cult audience among those who like to see their favourite actors racing through an ultra-tough crime thriller. They will also enjoy that everything you see on screen derives from an interesting story that is based on solid truth.