Review of Pain & Gain (2013) by Sagaciousfrank . — 08 Feb 2017

I turned this off half way through, and cutting a movie short is something I only do in exceptional cases, and 'Pain & Gain' qualified by a country mile. Michael Bay whores out almost every scene to either violence or tastelessness 'humour' (but usually a combination of both), even in the more serious/darker scenes (torture, for example) which really ought not to have been furnished with such crude levity, given the content along with the fact that this story is based on true events that happened to real people.

It tries so desperately hard in every single scene to be funny when it isn't, unless your idea of humour is pre-pubescent, puerile, tasteless gags. We're all familiar with Michael Bay's trademark cut-and-editing at breakneck speed, and that slick style sometimes works for his more action orientated films, but not for what is supposed to be a black-comedy- fact-based-drama. The pacing is all over the place, and Bay simply doesn't have the capacity to let the characters and story have some breathing room to develop and unfold. He rushes everything from one ridiculous scene to the next, and I don't think I've seen it done to such a neurotic and appalling degree, even by this director's poor standards. Judging from what I've seen here, it would appear that the effects of steroid-mania affected not only the people upon which these characters are loosely based, but also Mister Bay.