Why I love Pain and Gain (2013)

What do you think of Pain and Gain?

I think it suffers from a massive case of negative bias, because its rare that a typically trashy director could pull off something brilliant. I'm pretty sure if it was a subtitled Spanish movie by the director of Timecrimes or something that it would be heralded as a cult classic. I love Hitchcock, Kubrick, Coens, Billy Wilder, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch, even Wild Strawberries - but Pain and Gain somehow became my favorite movie.

Here's why I love it:

Its brilliantly satirical. The writers took a fascinating true-story and recognised its potential for a piss-take of the American dream. How greed, selfishness, stupidity, pride and excessive indulgence all became entwined. In classical style, the script structure mirrors a lifetime - the young, early days of yearning/scheming, the flabby indulgent middle age where emptiness and desperation kick in, the inevitable fall where it all gets taken away. The references to pop-culture ("the greatest men were self-made; Rocky, Scarface, The Godfather", the stripper basing her plan on Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman), the toxic values of the self-help industry (Johnny Wu standing in for Tony Robbins), the liberties taken with the story - it all adds to the fun of the satire. After all their incarcerations and the final edits of what happened, the voiceover of "that's the American dream baby" before the credits hit seals the deal.

The color saturation, photography, editing perfectly match the story, tone, energy and satire. Its why I think Michael Bay was the perfect choice to direct. It never gets boring on re-watches. Its shot and edited so tightly, with a ferocious energy that really makes the most of the medium. The use of different cameras and styles with kinetic editing reminds me of what Oliver Stone was going for with U-Turn, but Pain and Gain works so much better.

The soundtrack is brilliant. I've listened to it a lot as standalone music whilst swimming in Portugal, and hearing it in the film anchors me right back to those awesome summer vibes. The use of non-score songs like Gangsta's Paradise also fit the film perfectly. It needs to be seen/heard on a good system for sure, to do justice to the film.

There are so many other great touches throughout - Ed Harris's reflective narration about life to anchor the overblown satire to some grounding (with an excellent bit of score - Du Bois), the toe-shooting sequence, the Rock's acting of being high, the scenes shot in Bay's own house, Tony Shalhoub's performance.

TL:DR; Pain and Gain is better than you think, and you should re-watch it on a good system.

Submitted August 02, 2016 at 05:42PM by XInsects http://ift.tt/2aM6fpN