Pain & Gain

Pain & Gain - Dir. Michael Bay (2013)

I'm not sure what's more unbelievable about Pain & Gain, the true life story upon which it was based or the fact that this was Michael Bay's idea of a low-budget indie movie.

Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) has a great body, but not a lot of brains to go with his delusional view of the American dream or his staunch sense of entitlement. After doing time for a Ponzi scheme, Lugo goes to work as a personal trainer at the Sun Gym in Miami. Formerly a rundown spot for old folks, Lugo turns it into a haven for the built and beautiful. However, he's not satisfied and spots a big, fat payday in his obnoxious client Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub). Kershaw openly brags about his wealth, his offshore accounts, and the Schlotzsky's Deli he owns at the airport. Lugo hits on the idea to kidnap Kershaw and hold him hostage until he signs over all his assets. This ersatz mastermind recruits his best pal Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), a fellow bodybuilder who has been rendered impotent by steroid abuse, and Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), an ex-con who has traded his coke habit for Jesus. After several bumbling attempts, the muscle-bound trio snatches Kershaw and tortures him for nearly a month inside a warehouse full of sex toys. Lugo and his crew are able to enjoy their ill-gotten gains primarily because Kershaw is such a prick that the police have a hard time believing or sympathizing with him. When Doorbal and Doyle blow their newfound wealth on penile injections and cocaine, Lugo is forced to abduct a new mark with disastrous consequences.

Pain & Gain is unmistakably a Michael Bay film even without the widescreen mayhem and deafening explosions. His garish aesthetics are simpatico with the bizarre, true-life events adapted for the screen by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Captain America, Chronicles of Narnia). For once, it actually makes sense for Bay to populate the backgrounds with buxom babes since the story involves strippers galore. The saturated orange and teal color palette accentuates the sun soaked paradise of Miami. The camera whips along at a frenzied pace with super slow motion employed to great effect during a SWAT team raid. When Doyle barbecues a pair of dismembered hands to destroy fingerprints, an intertitle is stamped onto the screen to remind you that this is still based on fact. The question remains: is Bay just doing what comes natural or has he developed a sense of awareness that allows him to lampoon his own style?

As Bay flirts with the notion of self-parody, he walks a thin line between glorifying and condemning the actions of his characters. There's no doubt that these men aren't the least bit sympathetic, not to mention aggressively stupid. The fact that their brutality was played for laughs has upset the real victims of the Sun Gym Gang. The dark humor eschews closely to the works of Guy Ritchie or the Crank films. Stomachs may turn when chainsaws are broken out to chop up corpses or when a severed toe comes into play.

The cast really sinks their teeth into their respective roles with Mark Wahlberg excelling as the archetypal meathead. His Daniel Lugo is definitely cut from the same cloth as Dirk Diggler with a more sinister side. Tony Shalhoub brings Victor Kershaw to odious life while Rebel Wilson, Michael Rispoli, and Peter Stormare fill out the colorful supporting cast. Ken Jeong is thankfully utilized in small doses as a motivational speaker ("Be a do'er, not a don't'er") that inspires Lugo.  Ed Harris portrays the straight man as a retired cop turned private investigator. He essentially takes on the Tommy Lee Jones role in No Country for Old Men as the one good man in an insane world. The best performance in Pain & Gain belongs to Dwayne Johnson, who bulked up to bigger proportions than he ever had in his WWE career. There's a naiveté initially displayed by Johnson that makes Doyle a gentle giant, then shows deft comedic timing when he reverts into a desperate coke head.

Pain & Gain is easily Michael Bay's best picture, which may be a backhanded compliment when his filmography includes Bad Boys 2 and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Rating: *** (*****)

Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass - Dir. Matthew Vaughn (2010)


”With no power, comes no responsibility.”

Comic book superheroes in a real world setting have been a hot topic for many recent action films. Iron Man and Christopher Nolan’s Bat-films have attempted to ground larger-than-life heroes in a more realistic setting. Watchmen took a heady approach in its depiction of the socio-political impact of costumed individuals while Hancock went a more comedic route. Now, Kick-Ass brings us a hero for today’s MySpace generation.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is your everyday, run-of-the-mill comic book fanboy. He’s geeky, gawky, and dutifully hits his local comic shop every week with the only two friends he’s got. Dave’s only superpower is the self-described ability to be invisible to girls, especially his long-time crush, Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca). One day, Dave orders a green scuba suit off eBay and fashions himself a pair of batons in order to fight crime as a masked vigilante. Thus, Kick-Ass is born, not out of a childhood trauma or intricate revenge fantasy, but merely out of an idle musing.

As Kick-Ass, Dave’s first foray into crime fighting leads to him being stabbed and struck by a car. Unperturbed, dons the outfit once more to defend the victim of a gang beating. This time around, eyewitnesses record the fight via camera phones and upload the footage to YouTube. Suddenly, Kick-Ass is a viral sensation inspiring others to follow suit, no pun intended. Chief among them is former cop Damon Macready and his pig-tailed daughter Mindy who become the dynamic duo of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl. Together, they wage a brutal war against mob boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong). With a pair of caped crusaders taking apart his drug operation, D’Amico turns to his nebbish son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who becomes the Red Mist in order to lure the other heroes out into the open.

Kick-Ass was based on a creator-owned mini-series published by Marvel, written by Mark Millar (who also wrote Wanted) with art by John Romita Jr. Anyone familiar with Millar’s work will recognize his fingerprints all over the property, which was originally pitched as Spider-Man meets Superbad. Employing shock and awe tactics in his writing techniques, Kick-Ass is profane and unrepentantly violent. So much so that director Matthew Vaughn financed the picture independently after being turned down by every major studio. After raising the $30 million budget himself, footage was screened at Comic-Con to an overwhelmingly positive response and the film was picked up for distribution by Lionsgate.

At the center of the controversy is the character of Hit-Girl, played by a then 11-year old Chloe Moretz. She’s a scene-stealer with a confident presence rare in such a young actress. Plenty of comparisons to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver have been made. She’s a pint-size, death dealing dynamo. She’s Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, but small enough to fit in your pocket. The fact that someone so one is inflicting violence and having violence inflicted upon her has gotten many in an uproar. Roger Ebert has labeled the film as “morally reprehensible” for its depiction of Hit-Girl. It may churn some stomachs, but it’s hard for me to take any of it seriously when she’s hacking and slashing baddies to the theme song from The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.

Hit-Girl is a logical extension of the slightly creepy comic book tradition of the kid sidekick. DC Comics introduced the first kid sidekick in 1940 as a way to include a character for children to identify with. Never made sense to me, why would anyone want to be Robin when they could be Batman? In any event, Robin was a huge hit and pretty soon nearly every superhero leapt into action with a pre-pubescent costumed cohort with names like Sandy the Golden Boy and Stuff the Chinatown Kid. Kick-Ass brings the idea of reckless child endangerment into the 21st century with a young girl raised completely on comics, violent video games, and John Woo movies. The point is hammered home during one of Hit-Girl’s flurries as the film switches to the POV of a first-person shooter.

Most of the actors understand the over-the-top tone of the film and play it so, especially Nicolas Cage and Mark Strong. The always idiosyncratic Cage brings his own flourishes to the character. In his civilian guise, he’s Damon MacCready, an ex-cop bent on revenge. Rather than playing him as Dirty Harry, Cage gives him a Ward Cleaver quality with a Revenge of the Nerds-like laugh and a penchant for referring to his daughter as “child” and “baby doll.” As Big Daddy, he speaks with a deliberate, uneven staccato in a clear-cut homage to Adam West. The go-to-guy for villains, Mark Strong is excellent once again as the bad guy. He’s everything you expect from a mob boss.

The action sequences are handled well. Vaughn doesn’t rely on the usual quick cuts and tight close-ups that only manage to obscure the on-screen action. Vaughn had previously been attached to direct X-Men: The Last Stand and Thor, but finally gets to cut loose on a comic book movie with Kick-Ass. Vaughn formerly worked as Guy Ritchie’s producer on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch before making his directorial debut on Layer Cake (after Ritchie declined). He’s become a far more versatile director than Ritchie.

The main weakness of Kick-Ass lies in the love story between Dave and Katie. Under the false assumption that he is gay, Dave becomes Katie’s BFF and the pair engage in ludicrous activities like rubbing tanning lotion on each other while nearly nude. The end result is equally unbelievable and departs from the source material. A light spoiler for the comic, but the hero does not get the girl.

Kick-Ass subverts the trappings of the superhero genre then revels in them becoming pure nerd wish fulfillment in the end.

Rating: *** ½

The Taking of Pelham 123

The Taking of Pelham 123 - Dir. Tony Scott (2009)

This new version of The Taking of Pelham 123 is nominally a remake of the 1974 film starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. That version itself was originally based on a novel by John Godey and the story was remade previously in 1998 as a made-for-TV film with Edward James Olmos and Vincent D’Onofrio. The basic premise of a thief hijacking a subway train remains the same, but the 2009 version tosses in a lot of flash while incorporating current technology and life in a post-9/11 New York.

Denzel Washington is Walter Garber, a former bigshot with the NYC Municipal Transit Authority, but a fall from grace reduces him to a desk job as a dispatcher. It’s just bad luck that he’s on the line when Ryder (John Travolta) and his gang hijack a subway train and demand $10 million dollars from the Mayor (James Gandolfini). In the original, the gang use color-coordinated code-names like Mr, Blue and Mr. Green which would Tarantino would pay homage to in Reservoir Dogs. Die Hard underground. That’s essentially the entire plot in a nutshell. There aren’t a whole lot of nuances to it.

Even stuck behind a desk, Denzel still possesses a commanding on-screen presence. What works for the film is the fact that his Garber is not a standard action hero. He’s not a cop, just a former white-collar executive. For the most part, Garber’s interactions with Ryder are over the radio as they play mind games with each other while revealing bits and pieces of their past. What doesn’t work is the third act when they turn Garber into the gun-toting action man. While Denzel gives a strong, but restrained performance, Travolta gives an over-the-top, cartoonish performance. Travolta dons a knit skullcap, Fu Manchu-esque mustache, and tattoos in a failed attempt to look menacing. He screams at the top of his lungs and drops F-bombs for every other word because he’s crazy. That’s what crazy people do after all, kill innocent people and call them ‘motherfuckers.’

Any semblance of tension or drama is stripped away by Tony Scott’s predilections for frenetic camera work. His films for the last several years for have been oversaturated with superfluous camera movements, editing tricks, and bleached out colors. Pelham 123 is downright restrained when compared to Domino, but Scott still fails to realize whip pans and MTV trickery can never replace good, solid storytelling.

Rating: **