Rebel Wilson in “Pain and Gain” (AP)
Michael Bay gets a bad rap, but he deserves a worse one. His work is brainless, witless, soulless and gutless. It’s trite and rote and dull. Bay puts the ow in loud, the sham in shameless and the bull in predictable. The movies are celluloid hemorrhoids. No, worse: They’re celluloid Bon Jovi.
A Michael Bay film, in other words, is much the opposite of the new Michael Bay film, “Pain & Gain,” a dizzying lowlife saga that’s fast, smart, wicked, sort of ambitious and blazingly ironic. It’s as unpredictable as a Lindsay Lohan drive to the grocery store, as overstuffed as the pictures on Anthony Weiner’s Twitter feed and as hilarious as me on the bench press.
The movie’s set in Miami, the grease trap of the continent, way down where all the national crazy pools and festers. Or, if Florida is America’s foot, Miami is the gangrene-stricken toe.
Mark Wahlberg is Daniel Lugo, a personal trainer with three bad problems: He’s dumb, he’s a sociopath and he’s been to one of those hotel-ballroom self-help seminars. Lugo figures it’s his American right to get rich without deserving it. Wasn’t, he asks, this land once a bunch of scrawny colonies that became “the buffest, most pumping country on the planet”?
Together with his gym buddy Adrian (Anthony Mackie), who needs his money to fix his steroid-related impotence, and an ex-con named Paul (Dwayne Johnson) who has turned to Christ and sobriety, Lugo figures he’ll grab and torture the local scumbag zillionaire (Tony Shalhoub) until the rich guy signs away all his money and property. Then Lugo’ll move into the victim’s $3 million house and carry on as normal. “I don’t just want everything you have,” Lugo tells him. “I want you not to have it!”
Not a whole lot of this scheme goes off on schedule, but guess what? The tycoon is such a jerk that nobody reports him missing. A few weeks later, Lugo is living in his house.
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The police leap into inaction. They meet a guy half-dead in a hospital with a tire tread on his face, and their response is: “And you’re from Colombia?” That’s cop for, “Not interested.” But: Ed Harris. He’s a private detective. If anyone can fix Miami, it’s this guy.
If you’re thinking “GoodFellas” on steroids, or a much more ruthless “Ruthless People,” you’re onto something that Bay really hopes you’re onto, and — zing, bam — the story is largely true. (Pete Collins’ 30,000 word saga is on the Miami New Times site.) It could only have happened in a place like Miami, a place where everybody — the banks, the real estate agents, the cops — is pouring kerosene on a bonfire of the inanities. I’d say only Tom Wolfe could do it justice, but Bay’s Miami is crazier and funnier than it was in Wolfe’s Miami book: Asked if she thought there was anything odd about a guy buying a house with cash, a broker shrugs. “I thought maybe he was in sports, rap, you know, he’s black.”
Bay is not only riffing like Scorsese (the internal monologues, the camera gliding like it’s on ice skates, “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”), he does it with Quentin Tarantino flair. A shot of Wahlberg’s feet, bound up in surgical booties while exiting an elevator, fits the plot seamlessly — but it’s also a joke on “The Departed.” Bay even spoofs the most hack-tacular Bay-ism with a shot of three guys confidently strolling away from a fireball — a fireball that turns out to be a wet firecracker.
Normally, praising the script of a Bay movie is like telling Megan Fox she has pretty ears, but Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus have turned in a crackling, pointed, unbelievably dense screenplay that tops Tarantino’s last one. It presses slightly too hard for significance with its musing on the American dream, and the humor occasionally gets too broad, but the wit pops like a Miami girl’s breast implants. There’s “You’re a Jew, right? I think I can help you.”
Lugo says, “I’ve watched a lot of movies. I know what I’m doing.” Posing as a CIA agent, he says, “These goggles, they’re government issue. I guess in a way so am I.”
I haven’t even gotten to the brilliance of the sets (dismal motels, sun-wrecked pavement, powder blue), or of Rebel Wilson as Adrian’s wife, or of Ken Jeong as the motivational speaker. This movie is a knucklehead “Great Gatsby.” I laughed my glutes off.
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