PAIN AND GAIN (Michael Bay, 2013)

-

Michael Bay is back in Miami, and we love him when his setting is in Miami. BAD BOYS and BAD BOYS 2 remind us that a genuine filmmaker is somewhere inside Michael Bay, enough to forget that he wasted our money and intellect with the TRANSFORMERS sequels. 

Bay shoots Miami beautifully, with his aerial shots and his panoramic sweep of the skyline just before dawn. Watching PAIN AND GAIN reminded me a lot of BAD BOYS (BAD BOYS is one of the best action flicks out there), what with the language, the humor, the editing, and the attitude.

Okay, so Bay is known for excessive everything- too much violence, stylized shots, scoring, you name it. In PAIN AND GAIN there is an excess of exposition during the first half of the movie that the pacing drags like a math problem. But the speed picks up once things spiral out of control.

I did not expect the film to be this wild, and the characters, despite the jokes are surprisingly dark and demented, okay maybe just Mark Wahlberg's character.

Dwayne Johnson on the other hand, plays a coke addict with minuscule brains devilishly well. To see "The Rock" so beefed up, smashing people's faces and screw up almost every single time is hysterical. 

Anthony Mackie is crazy funny too, sort of a reincarnation of Will Smith's and Marcus Lawrence's characters in BAD BOYS fused together.

And the ninja and alien costumes were indeed a nice touch. (see for yourself)

PAIN AND GAIN navigates the subjects of greed and narcissism, but in the end it all boils down to ego. Ego is what drove these guys to hatch a high risk and highly-insane extortion scheme. Like the teens in THE BLING RING, they were stupid enough to flash  their newly-acquired wealth in public. And this was back in 1994. 

This is a true story, as what the filmmakers tell us, despite the existence of a lot of bizarre sequences, and of which Dwayne Johnson having a barbecue tops my list of favorite moments of ridiculousness. 

The film's second half deviates dramatically in tone, and while there is still humor present (shopping for a kill at your local hardware, anyone?) we are forced to examine the lives of the three ambitious crooks and judge the weight of their actions. Tony Shalhoub as the guy they almost beat to death is annoying to the nth level, but as the story progresses, we root for him. Ed Harris is always authentic as the conscience character, as the ex-cop turned private eye determined to hunt down Wahlberg and co. 

I just wished Bay did not bombard the screen with so many insanity that the obvious downside is we tend to ignore the seriousness of the extortionists' actions. But if his intention is to portray the whole caper as an enormous farce with a plan destined to fail, then he succeeded. 

RATING: 3/5






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitalizing on ta
Read more

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn'
Read more

A study of spaces in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's 'Happy Old Year'

-
Image
Space is both an overarching theme and visual signifier in Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Happy Old Year . Its protagonist, Jean (Chutimon Chuengcharoensukying) comes home from a lengthy stay abroad, determined to declutter her life, and along with it, old things that belong to a past she is desperately running away from. As we watch Jean plan the redesign of their family house into a more spacious and minimalist residential office, we also witness the transformation of the persons that inhabit the house, as well as their connection to other people, most of them absent from the frame. Jean the destroyer Millennials have often been criticized for being rash with their actions, and for having their way, no matter what. The filmmaker, a millennial himself, understands this stigma, and subliminally argues that millennials are the way they are because of a multitude of factors: rising cost of living, the evolution of discourse as a result of technology (such as film streaming se
Read more