Pain & Gain was, how do I put this, unexpectedly entertaining. Not that I didn’t expect a movie with Mark Wahlberg and The Rock to be entertaining, because I did, but it wasn’t entertaining in the way I had expected, hence “unexpectedly entertaining."
It was trailers like this that made me think this movie was going to be all tits, ass, ass-kicking, and meathead jokes.
…It was Pain & Gain commercials like that that made me think this movie was going to be all titties, ass, ass-kicking, and meathead jokes.
Pain & Gain was NOT all tits, ass, ass-kicking, and meathead jokes. That being said..
There were tits.
Bar Paly is smokin’ hot.
There was ass…
There was ass-kicking…
And there were meathead jokes…
Because a black guy and a Somoan go tanning.
But Pain & Gain wasn’t intended to be a comedy. It was an artist’s depiction of true life events, and the true story of Daniel Lugo and Adrian Doorbal is fuuuuuuuccckked up.
Pain & Gain is a true story about a gang of bodybuilding kidnappers with a penchant for cash, cocaine, strippers, and steroids. It is a surreal tale of some seriously stupid people, and quite honestly it was a bit off-putting knowing that this movie would only perpetuate the meathead stereotype.
I mean, these guys were supremely idiotic, but they get away with it for the better part of a year. There is one scene where The Rock’s character is grilling human hands to “burn off the fingerprints."
It was at this point that text flashed across the screen reminding the audience that yes, “THIS IS STILL A TRUE STORY."
And almost as unbelievable was the actual story itself, was the size of Dwayne Johnson.
The Rock got so big for this movie that I was kind of scared…
Also maybe a little bit turned on…
As entertaining as The Rock’s size was, so was his character. Dwayne was playing Carl Weekes, a very interesting person whose stupidity is accentuated in two very different forms.
There is the born-again Christian Carl Weekes: fresh out of prison, sporting “I Am On Team Jesus" T-shirts, and preaching a new, sober, I-have-been-saved outlook on life. A character as ridiculous as only monstrous The Rock could portray:
And there was the cocaine fueled megatard Carl Weekes, as only The Rock could portray:
TL;DR Review of Pain & Gain
Mark Wahlberg got pretty beefy for this flick. Bar Paly is smokin’ hot. All-in-all, the outlandishly surreal (and gruesome) actual events that fueled the plot and storyline overpowered the gratuitous T&A and meathead comedy that my Two Scooping brain so desperately craved. And everything was overpowered by the shear magnitude of Dwayne “The Rock" Johnson.
- Tony “Two Scoops" Muscoli
