The large-scale destructiveness he has previously wrecked upon public and private property (including entire cities), Michael Bay visits on the human body in Pain & Gain, a pulverizing steroidal farce based on a bizarre-but-true kidnapping-and-murder case. Suggesting Fargo�by way of the Three Stooges, Bay?s latest certainly proves that the Transformers�auteur does have something more than jacked-up robots on his mind: specifically, jacked-up muscle men who will stop at nothing to achieve their deeply twisted notion of the American dream. With a very fine ensemble cast recruited to play an array of overtly despicable characters, this unapologetically vulgar, sometimes quite funny, often stomach-churning bacchanal will surely prove too extreme for great swathes of the multiplex crowd. But the marquee value of topliners Mark Wahlberg�and Dwayne Johnson, plus the pic?s reportedly modest $25 million pricetag, spells more gain than pain for Paramount?s box office pecs.
Given that every Bay film is something of a stamina test, marked by passages of intense exhilaration and paralyzing fatigue, with Pain & Gain�the director may have lucked into the most fitting subject matter of his career: the world of obsessive bodybuilders and the trainers who push them beyond the brink of exhaustion. Adapted by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Captain America: The First Avenger,�the Narnia trilogy) from a series of articles originally published in the Miami New Times by Pete Collins, the film tells of one such muscle mecca, Miami?s Sun Gym, where staff and clientele include a liberal mixture of strippers, ex-cons and small-time scam artists.
One such hustler is Sun Gym manager Danny Lugo (Wahlberg) who, in the fall of 1994, decides to abduct one of his clients, wealthy Colombian-American businessman Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub) ? and defraud him of his…
Coco Lee Connie Nielsen Cristina Dumitru Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris
