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| Three Hollywood beefcakes against the Stars and Stripes make up this poster for Michael Bay's Pain & Gain |
Daniel Lugo is an ambitious bodybuilder and trainer in Miami, Florida, who wants more and makes a plan of how he's going to get it: With two compadres he intends to kidnap a rich man and steal everything he owns.
Pain & Gain is written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (You Kill Me (2007), both), based on a 1999 series of Miami New Times articles about the real-life Sun Gym gang written by Pete Collins. The film is directed by Michael Bay (Bad Boys (1995)).
Bay appropriates a Goodfellas (1990)-like approach to this incredible, more or less true crime story, which succeeds largely thanks to a tremendous cast: Dwayne Johnson (The Other Guys (2010)) is charismatic and funny as a neo-Christian coke-head, and Anthony Mackie (Seberg (2019)) and Mark Wahlberg (Planet of the Apes (2001)) give themselves 100 % as the Stooges-like gang's other two knucklehead members. Tony Shalhoub (Rosy (2018)) is frenetic as one unsympathetic victim; Rebel Wilson (Bridesmaids (2011)) is funny; Rob Cordry (80 for Brady (2023)) is cool; and Ed Harris (Absolute Power (1997)) is perfect as the detective who becomes the group's downfall.
Photographed (by Ben Seresin (The Mummy (2017)) with the expected visual flair and eye for details of excess from the sickly Miami life. A part of the fun in Pain & Gain is undeniably in poor taste, (SPOILER especially the chainsaw scene), but since it is a Bay picture about criminal bodybuilders in Miami, this reservation seems pointless. The film gets a bit lost in all the points of its outrageous story and thereby grows long. Yet it remains very entertaining as a dark-humored crime dramedy.
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Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 26 mil. $
Box office: 87.3 mil. $
= Box office success (returned 3.35 times its cost)
[Pain & Gain premiered 11 April (Miami, Florida) and runs 129 minutes. Shooting took place from April - June 2012 in Miami, Florida. The film opened #1 to a 20.2 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 3 weekends in the top 5 (#2-#3-#4), grossing 49.8 mil. $ (57 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Russia with 7.2 mil. $ (8.2 %) and Germany with 6.2 mil. $ (7.1 %). Sun Gym gang victim Mark Schiller sued over his portrayal in the film, and Paramount paid him an undisclosed sum to drop the suit. Bay returned with Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). Johnson returned in Fast & Furious 6 (2013); Wahlberg in 2 Guns (2013). Pain & Gain is rotten at 50 % with a 5.40/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Pain & Gain?
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