Pain & Gain

Year 16, Day 147 - 5/26/24 - Movie #4,736

BEFORE: So we've religiously watched 11 seasons of "The Masked Singer", and my wife and I have a friendly competition to see who can accurately predict the identities of more celebrities.  It's an imperfect process, because sometimes you just get a FEELING, like I recognized Paul Shaffer and Michael Bolton and Wendy Williams right away, and I couldn't tell you for sure exactly how I did that.  It's some subconscious combination of recognizing what you think someone's singing voice is, along with their body language, how they move around and of course, the clues they give you.  She has a better understanding of famous singers' vocals, like she got Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick and Thelma Houston. but I have a slightly better grasp on pop culture.  Either way, it's a mixed bag, hits and misses - honestly I think the whole show is rigged so sometimes I identify people by thinking, "Who would be at the proper level of fame to appear on this show?" or "Who's got something to promote?"  

But in the last two seasons, it feels like the writers on the show have gone out of their way to trick us with the clues, intentionally misleading us so we can no longer succeed at this.  I was convinced that the Anteater character last year was John Cougar Mellencamp, partially because the costume had a set of overalls in it, but also during the clue packages there was an image of both a cougar and melon - what else could explain this?  Spoiler alert, it was not John Cougar Mellencamp.  

This season, my wife was similarly misled by the clues for the Gumball character, which included a map of Louisiana, a reference to being a "superhero", and having co-starred with Channing Tatum and Ken Jeong.  Well, Anthony Mackie ticks all those boxes, because he was in "10 Years" with Channing Tatum, and he co-starred with Ken Jeong in this film, "Pain & Gain".  Right up until the finale, my wife was convinced that Anthony Mackie was in this Iron-Man like costume, even though he didn't play Iron Man or War Machine in the Marvel movies, is divorced so probably wouldn't be dedicating a song to his wife, and for all we know, can't really sing at all.  I understand that we latch on to false conclusions and then can't get off of them, but I also think there's an active ongoing attempt to mislead us with the clues now.  

For, me when the Clock character sang "Piano Man", I caught a bit of a vocal warble that reminded me of "Wing Beneath my Wings", so I convinced myself that it HAD to be Bette Midler in that costume, like she seems like she'd be game to do that show, but then a few episodes later she talked about her kids, and I "cheated" by checking on Wikipedia to see if Ms. Midler had any children, and she doesn't.  Still, I hung on right to the end and would not concede, I was sure that once the reveal happened, I'd be proven right.  Didn't happen.  

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "The Big Hit". 

THE PLOT: A trio of bodybuilders in Florida get caught up in an extortion ring and a kidnapping scheme that goes terrible wrong. 

AFTER: We're headed right for another American holiday, Memorial Day - and all the news could report on this week is how many people are traveling, filling up our country's airports and bus stations and car rental agencies, because simply everyone HAS to get out of town this weekend.  Well, I'm sorry to have to tell all the fine people who work for the news that if it happens every year at the same time, that is NOT news, which technically by definition needs to be NEW.  If you do a piece on how people are eating turkey for Thanksgiving, that's not news. Hey, people are buying roses and chocolates this Valentine's Day. Nope, not news.  People are going to travel or go to the beach on Memorial Day weekend as certainly as fish are going to swim and birds are going to fly, and simply nobody is going to change their plans just because they saw a news report about how there's a four-hour long line at the airport, so if you haven't left to catch your plane yet, you're going to miss it.  Eventually people will figure out that if they have to catch a plane on Friday, they need to go to the airport on Thursday and camp out. Life lessons are not learned easily.

I've been around a while, I've learned a few things - as a result, I never go anywhere on a holiday weekend, that's the perfect time for a staycation.  We went to North Carolina 2 weeks ago, during a week where nearly NOBODY else was going on vacation, because Memorial Day is coming up, and kids, we'll go on vacation then like all the other sheeple do, except one idiot in Queens, NY who just wants to sleep in late and get a few chores done around the house, maybe not even that if he's not feeling up to it.  Probably he's just going to watch a couple movies, clear some TV shows off his DVR and think about doing laundry, because that pile of dirty t-shirts is now bigger than he is.  There was a BBQ rib-eating event yesterday, and normally I'm drawn to such things like a magnet, however on a holiday weekend in BROOKLYN?  Forget it, the place is going to be crowded with hipsters, some of whom don't even eat meat, but they're there ironically - no, thank you.  I worked yesterday at the theater instead, a very crowded screening of a new documentary about the history of hip-hop, and now I'm at home, relaxing for two days and we'll see if I can make a dent on that list of chores.  Definitely, we need to put the screen window in the front door, and OK, sure, let's drop off some more comic books at the storage unit, but then I'd just like to drink a few beers and chill out, please.  No beaches, no car trips, no BBQ unless we can get take-out.  Look, you have your holiday weekend, and I'll have mine.  

The absolute last place I'd want to be is in Florida, for many reasons, and the temperature is just one among many.  Maybe we'll go back down to North Carolina in October, visit the state fair and see my parents again, but that will need to be planned, like when is NY Comic-Con, or will I quit that job between then and now and not care about that?  It's too early to even think about.  But Florida has been on our "DO NOT VISIT" list since the pandemic, we had tickets to visit her family friends down there in March 2020, but then the whole world shut down and we eventually cashed in the tickets to travel to Chicago in 2021 and visit her brother.  Man, between Trump and DeSantis and alligators and global warming, and book-banning and gay-bashing and conservative Republicans in general, I'm never going back (two of our cruises sailed from Florida, so visiting back then was a necessary evil).  And everything about this film emphasizes the reasons why.  

Yes, America is the biggest, baddest, most jacked-up nation on the planet, and Florida doubly so.  All of our biggest bodybuilders apparently call it home, having a "beach body" is simply the most imporant thing, and along with that, it seems like 75% of our country's strippers also call Florida home.  (Now wait a minute, that sounds like it could be a good thing, but let me also assume for a minute that it's probably not.  Florida therefore has the maximum number of hot women eager to separate men from their money.). Let's re-emphasize that "Pain & Gain" is based on a true story, a series of articles in the Miami New Times in 1999 detailed the exploits of a group of bodybuilding ex-cons who used kidnapping, extortion and torture techniques to get wealthy men to sign over their property and fortunes to them.  

Many of the names and details were changed for the film, but the real-life Daniel Lugo did use his job at the gym to meet his targets - wealthy men who needed fitness advice, and whom he envied for their lifestyles, fast cars, owning several properties, etc.  Sure, why not kidnap one of these rich a-holes and threaten him so he'll sign over his fortune to you, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, a lot, obviously, and about 2/3 of this movie is watching their schemes go wronger and wronger until finally even the incompetent and very racist Dade County police are convinced to maybe start doing their jobs and break up the serial kidnapping and extortion ring.  

Sure, the film doesn't depict things EXACTLY as they happened, there's some creative license involved.  If you really want to read up on the Sun Gym gang and their exploits, you're still free to do so.  The goal of filmmakers is to make an entertaining movie based on some of the facts, whatever fits together the best dramatically or comedically has to take precedence over getting everything 100% accurate, this isn't a documentary, after all.  The character played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is a composite, an amalgam of several gang members, one who was super into religion, another who was hooked on cocaine, and no member of the Sun Gym gang ever robbed an armored car, getting his toe shot off in the process.  

Ultimately, the blame clearly lies on the self-help guru who encouraged Daniel Lugo to be a "Do-er" and not a "Don't-er", and just knowing that our country even HAS a self-help/encouragement industry really tells you all you need to know about the U.S.  Every single one of them, from Tony Robbins on down, is a con artist, plain and simple, and I put them squarely in the same category as priests and cult leaders. If the last step in their self-help program isn't "Finally, create a self-help program and bilk money out of clueless losers looking for the secrets of success" then you know they're lying sacks of you-know-what. 

Considering the subject matter, I think director Michael Bay maybe did the best he could here with what he had to work with - it was probably difficult to make an action/crime film and a black comedy at the same time.  Committing murder and cutting up two bodies is just not a great topic for a comedy, even a dark one, and I don't think having mechanical problems with an imported chainsaw or putting the corpses' hands on a BBQ grill to remove their fingerprints really qualify as comic moments, IMHO. But hey, your mileage may vary. Nor does running over their mark's head with a van after setting him on fire and trying to kill him in a staged car crash.  At some point that's all really sad and pathetic, rather than amusing.  Still, this counts as a vast improvements over the other Mark Wahlberg films from last week, like "Fear" and "The Big Hit".

Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "Final Portrait"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Coma"), Rob Corddry (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Senior Year"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Bar Paly (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Keili Lefkovitz, Emily Rutherfurd (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Larry Hankin (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Tony Plana (last seen in "Havana"), Peter Stormare (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Vivi Pineda, Ken Clement (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Yolanthe Cabau, Brian Stepanek (last seen in "Dark Skies"), Persi Caputo, Bill Kelly (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Gregg Weiner, Parris Buckner (last seen in "Out of Time"), Nicholas X. Parsons, Rushanna Lewis, Richard Haylor (last seen in "Table 19"), Trudie Petersen, Patrick Bristow (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar"), Mike Tremont (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), Holland Hayes, Sabrina Mayfield, Kiki Harris (also last seen in "Sex Drive"), Choice Gray, Mike Benitez (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Cedric DePasquale, Kory Getman, John Archer Lundgren (last seen in "Father Figures"), Stephanie McLane, Tommy O'Brien with cameos from Kurt Angle (last seen in "Warrior"), Wladimir Klitschko (last seen in "Ocean's Eleven")

RATING: 4 out of 10 fake notarized documents